Where Has The Laughter Gone?

Several years back, when I was going through a challenging time, a wise person gave me an unusual piece of advice: “Watch Comedy Central.”  I did, I laughed a lot, and I felt a lot better.  It was good medicine, good therapy.  It still is.  I have satellite radio in my car, and one of the stations I listen to often is “Laugh USA.”  Again, good stuff for the soul and the belly.

Laughter can at times be vicious and demeaning – jokes told at someone else’s expense, a put-down, a mean-spirited slam.  Those jokes get laughs, but they leave me feeling a bit demeaned myself, and guilty.  My favorite comedians are those who laugh at themselves, who tell jokes at their own expense, celebrating their own imperfect lives.  And that’s why one of my all-time favorites is the late Rodney Dangerfield, whose signature line was, “I don’t get no respect.”  A couple of examples:

“My wife was afraid of the dark, saw me naked, and now she’s afraid of the light!”

“When I get in an elevator, the operator takes one look and says, ‘Basement?’”

And in 2004, entering a Los Angeles hospital for heart valve surgery, he said, “If things go right I’ll be there about a week, and if things don’t go right, I’ll be there about an hour and a half.”  He lapsed into a coma after the operation and never recovered.  I think he would have found it profoundly funny.

Rodney, despite great success as a comedian, suffered bouts of deep depression and low self-esteem.  But his self-deprecating humor wasn’t the work of a man wallowing in all that, it was both an escape from grim reality and a way of facing his demons and laughing at them.

I’ve thought about Rodney Dangerfield a good bit in recent days as I’ve watched events unfold in places across our globe – grim reality that has the potential of making us both fearful and cynical.  There doesn’t seem to be much to laugh about these days.  And I’ve thought that folks who perpetrate violence, who create havoc and heartbreak by taking lives, take themselves and their credos so incredibly seriously that they have absolutely no capacity for laughter, especially about themselves.  Those terrorists in Paris, in fact, wanted to kill laughter.  I hope we don’t let them.

Lest it seem that the assault on laughter is only the work of terrorists, consider our political systems – here and elsewhere.  People of every conceivable stripe who hold high office are by and large humorless people, unremittingly grim about their ideologies, bent on demonizing anyone who disagrees.  How long has it been since you’ve seen a member of Congress laugh?  I think if we can find occasions to laugh at ourselves, that means we realize we aren’t perfect, and that somebody we disagree with might have an idea worth considering.  It also means we've found some joy in what we believe.

I love using humor in my storytelling.  If I’m sitting in the audience at a performance of one of my plays, my greatest joy is when one of my lines provokes laughter.  I believe in humor leavening drama and – lest the story lapse into slapstick – drama leavening humor.  The writers I admire the most are those who have an exquisite balance of both drama and humor in their work.

I wish we had more laughter.  I wish we had more Rodney Dangerfields.  If we gave ourselves a little less respect and a little more humor, we might be better off.

The Danger of Saying Too Much

In my previous life as a television person I was fortunate to work with people with far more experience and wisdom than I, and I tried to learn from them.  Two in particular stand out because of the way they approached their jobs.

Clyde McLean was the long-time weatherman at Charlotte’s WBTV.  He wasn’t a trained meteorologist, he was an announcer who did the weather at 6:00pm, but his many years observing and reporting on the weather in the Carolinas made him vastly knowledgeable.  His trick was, he didn’t burden the audience with that vast knowledge.

Clyde told the story of the elementary-age kid who had to do a report for class on weather.  He went to his father.  “Dad, what’s weather?”  Dad replied, “Go ask your mother.”  And the kid said, “I don’t want to know that much about weather.”  Clyde took the same approach.  He figured if you tuned in at six o’clock, you wanted to know the basics.  Rain or shine, sleet or snow, fair or foul?  Clyde worked in the days before fancy computer-generated graphics; he physically drew on a big map with a marker, showing you troughs and fronts, high and low pressures.  But he never over-did it.  He stuck to the basics.  Here’s what it looks like tomorrow, and the next few days after that.

Clyde knew that weather forecasting, especially in the years before a lot of satellite stuff and computer modeling, was an approximate thing.  He loved to tell the story of the winter night when he predicted partly cloudy skies for the next day, only to get a morning call from a fellow who said, “I’ve got six inches of partly cloudy in my front yard.”

The other colleague who comes to mind in this regard is Jim Thacker, the best television sportscaster I’ve ever been around.  Jim not only anchored the sports desk for WBTV, he was – along with superb analyst Billy Packer – the play-by-play man for ACC basketball, and a regular on CBS-TV’s coverage of pro golf, including the Masters Tournament.  I once sat in the tower with Jim as he worked a tournament in.  He was first of all meticulously prepared.  He had constantly-updated note cards on every PGA player.  He knew the course like the back of his hand.  But his genius, I think, was in knowing what not to say.  Jim told me, “Never tell the viewer something they can see for themselves.”  Like Clyde McLean, he never over-did it.

I’ve been thinking about Clyde and Jim as I’ve watched college football bowl games the past few days, and thought how the announcers violate their principles ad nauseum.  The play-by-play guy tells us everything we can see for ourselves, and the analyst rattles on about the intricacies of the game that add nothing to our enjoyment of the action.  They just can’t seem to shut up.  And it’s not just in college football.  A few announcing teams across American sport get it right – i.e. Jim Nantz and his crew at the Masters – most don’t.  Thank goodness for mute buttons on our remotes.

I try to apply Clyde and Jim’s wisdom when I write.  I’m a firm believer in the idea that less is more.  Words are the waves on which a story rides, and if I pile on too many words, the waves get choppy, and pretty soon you’re more concerned with the chop than the story.  My job is to give you a few hopefully well-chosen words to trigger your imagination, and let you become a partner in the story-telling.  Like Clyde, I need to keep the details at a minimum; like Jim, I need to let you see for yourself.  I need to know when to just shut up.

Another role model is Ernest Hemingway, who once said, “I know the twenty-five cent words, therefore I can use the nickel words.”  I like nickel words, and as few of them as absolutely necessary.  I wish sports announcers did too.

My All Time Favorite True Christmas Story

They are a vanload of pilgrims, climbing through the swirling snow of a late December night from the Denver airport up toward ski country – a family from Missouri, another from North Carolina, a couple of college kids headed home for the holidays.  And the Guitar Man.

He wears jeans and a faded leather jacket.  His luggage consists of a duffel bag and a battered guitar case – a six-stringed Martin or Gibson probably, wood worn bare by the brushing wings of a million notes and chords.  He’s in his late twenties and he has a nice smile.  But he has a road-weary look about him, sort of like his guitar case.

The van driver is a jolly sort who keeps up a running conversation with his passengers, partly to relieve the boredom of the trip he makes up and down I-70 so many times that every boulder, every snow-crusted pine is etched in his subconscious; but also because he’s genuinely interested in people and he full of the holiday spirit.  He’s got Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops playing “Good King Wenceslas” on the stereo.  And he wants to know who the pilgrims are and where they’re from.  That’s how they get to know that they’re Missourians and Carolinians and college students, trading names and places and bits of personal background here in the warm temporary intimacy of a rubber-tired cocoon.

The last to speak is the Guitar Man, who says he’s a folksinger.  He’s been traveling the East, playing coffee houses and college campuses and small bars, trying to figure out if he can make a living with his music.  He’s soft-spoken and engagingly modest and the rest of the passengers can hear the music in his voice – a traveling troubadour, a man who tells stories in song.  And he has a story of his own.

There’s a lady in Frisco, a little mountain town just off the interstate.  A rather special lady, or at least she used to be.  She and the Guitar Man were more than friends once upon a time not loo long ago, until the music took hold and pulled him out on the road.  The Lady in Frisco begged him not to go, but it was something he just had to do.  The music was strong inside him – stronger, he thought, than love.  So he went, hoping that maybe love would wait.  During these long months while he was out there in the coffee houses and bars, the Guitar Man and the Lady in Frisco haven’t spoken or written, not once.  That was the way she wanted it.

Now, on this snowy night just before Christmas, the Guitar Man is headed back to Frisco, back to the tiny apartment where the Lady lives, carrying his duffel bag and his guitar and his heart.  The Lady in Frisco doesn’t know he’s coming.  And he doesn’t know what he’ll find when he gets there.  Maybe there’s someone else.  Maybe she’s so hurt and disappointed, maybe she thinks he’s so unreliable, she doesn’t want to see him any more.  She may not let him in.  But he’s come all this way to try.

The Guitar Man’s fellow pilgrims are all but struck dumb y his bittersweet story and by the anticipation of what’s to come.  The Guitar Man will be the first passenger to disembark, and all of the others will get to see if the Lady in Frisco turns him away.  If she does, he’ll ride on to the next town and find a place to crash for the night.

The van climbs on, past the meadow where the buffalo herd hunkers against the frigid night, past the rocks where the big-horn sheep scramble by day, up and over the Continental Divide.  The driver and the pilgrims are quiet, lost in their thoughts, considering the Continental Divide of the heart where east meets west and sometimes the altitude and the bitter wind are too much, where even the most resolute traveler has to turn back and seek shelter elsewhere.

On the stereo, the joyous strings of the Boston Pops ring out, “O Come All Ye Faithful.”  But the pilgrims hear another song of another season:  Ramblin’ Man, why don’t you settle down; Boston ain’t your kind of town; There ain’t no gold and there ain’t nobody like me.

And then they’re in Frisco and the van is crunching along a back street, pulling up in front of a row of one-story apartments.  Inside the van, you can hear a pin drop.  The Guitar Man climbs out.  “Good luck,” the driver says.  The Guitar man smiles, closes the door behind him, hoists his duffel bag and guitar case, and climbs the steps.  There’s a Christmas tree in the window, all decorated with colored lights and tinsel.  But for the pilgrims in the van, their faces pressed to the windows, it won’t be Christmas unless…

The Guitar Man knocks.  The door opens, the rectangle of light framing a young woman in a bathrobe.  The folks in the van can’t see her face very well, but they can imagine surprise, shock, maybe even anger.  Or maybe nothing.  That would be the worse.  “Come on lady,” somebody in the van says softly, “let him in.”  But they stand there in the light for a long moment, the Guitar Man and the Lady from Frisco, oblivious to the cold, the rest of their lives hanging in the balance.

Then she steps back from the door, making room for him.  The Guitar Man turns and gives the van folks a thumb’s up and then he enters and closes the door behind him.  In the van, they’re cheering and crying.

The pilgrims move on into the night, now lovely and silent and at peace with itself, all of them touched in some deep place of the soul they had forgotten was there.

The Only Thing That Really Matters

Paulette and I have just spent a week with our 5-month-old grandson Paul, and I came away from the experience reinforced in my belief about what should matter most in our lives.  The short of it is the thing called relationships, and that encompasses a vast territory in this business of being human. 

I had a great time with Paul.  Paulette did most of the feeding/napping stuff, and I was around to lift, tote, fetch, change diapers, and entertain.  Paul loves to be carried, so we spent a lot of time in close verticality.  He’s at the age where his eyesight is fully developed, and he takes a keen interest in everything around him.  He wants to see, touch, feel, and put things in his mouth.  I provide a good bit of the locomotion to help him do all of that.

But it’s not all just toting the baby around.  Paul and I had a regular routine that includes educational and cultural development.  We sing together.  I am partial to “She’ll Be Comin’ Around The Mountain,” and “Froggy Went A’Courtin’.”  Paul chooses to overlook my less-than-sterling singing qualities, and when I launch into one of the songs, his face lights up.  We play the piano together, and again, Paul doesn’t mind that my pianistic dexterity is mostly of the one-finger-at-a-time sort.  Paul plays one fist at a time, a much advanced technique.  I think I can hear some Chopin in there somewhere.

We also practice our Spanish.  Buenos dias, Pablo.  Como esta?  Muy bien, gracias.  Next we will advance to the novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, from the original Spanish, of course.

The main thing is that we are simply together.  We are building a relationship that will be a work in progress as long as we are both on the planet together.  We will give to and take from each other in ways large and small.  I will have his back and he will have mine.  Paul will always know that no matter what he does or who he becomes, I will love him unconditionally.  In doing so, I’ll get the same back from him.

I explored the business of relationships in my novel Captain Saturday.  My hero, Will Baggett, is Raleigh’s most popular TV weatherman, pretty much caught up in his minor local celebrity.  But then suddenly and precipitously, Will loses his job, and in taking stock of the wreckage about him, he realizes that it includes his relationships with the people he should cherish most – his wife and nearly-grown son.  The story is how Will, laid low by fickle fate, tries to re-invent himself and re-capture those damaged relationships.  I’ve had a good number of folks say that reading about Will Baggett prompted them to take stock of their own lives and see if there are some things that need mending.  For a storyteller, that’s the ultimate payback. 

I think some of the most important relationships we build are those with people who are younger.  We all have somebody younger, and when we pay attention, invest time and energy in them, and let them know in a thousand ways that they’re important to us and themselves, we help them build good foundations.  In turn, it enriches our own lives.

I believe we naturally think a lot about relationships during the holiday season.  We remember those who are no longer with us, and take stock of our feelings for those who are still here.  Relationships can be tricky and tough, because we human beings are a messy lot and we are prone to get things tangled up when we deal with those we’re supposed to cherish.  But building, strengthening, and maintaining relationships is what life is all about.  We’re all connected, all precious in God’s eyes, and all worthy of acts of love and kindness.

We often hear about the things we can’t take with us – fame, fortune, etc.  I prefer to thing about the things we leave behind, the bonds we have with family, friends, and indeed all of God’s great creation.  That’s the only thing that really matters.

There's No Place Like Roberdel

One of my favorite parts of The Wizard of Oz comes near the end.  Dorothy, the plucky girl with the vivid imagination, has lived through mind-boggling adventures in a fantastical land filled with munchkins and witches, lions and tin men and scarecrows.  But now she wants to go home, to Kansas.  She repeats, over and over, “There’s no place like home.  There’s no place like home.”  And poof, there she is, back in the place she loves, surrounded by people who love her.

I thought about Dorothy the other day when I visited Roberdel.  The reason I went was because I’m doing some writing about Wingate University in North Carolina and its President, Dr. Jerry McGee, who’s retiring after leading the school for 23 years of growth and transformation.  When I imagine characters for a novel, I need to know their backstory: how they got to be the people they are.  It’s the same for a piece of nonfiction.  I can’t understand Wingate University without knowing Jerry McGee.  And I can’t know him without knowing Roberdel.

It’s a small place on the outskirts of Rockingham, North Carolina, a former textile mill village.  The mill is long gone, along with most of the textile industry that once drove the local economy.  But for the better part of the 20th century, it was a vibrant place – the mill surrounded by modest homes, most of them occupied by millworkers including McGee’s extended family.  It was a close-knit community of hard-working families where adults looked out for the kids, where people never locked their doors because there was no crime, where neighbors cared about neighbors.  Life revolved around the mill, the churches, and the school. 

Young folks who grew up in Roberdel absorbed a set of values that seem to have served them well.  McGee, in a book he wrote about his youth, described the culture of the Roberdel school: “They taught us to be responsible, to respect the feelings and opinions of others and to be productive members of our community.  They made sure we understood that everyone was equal in the eyes of God, no matter where they lived, who their parents were, or what color their skin was, and that we could do anything we wished to do with our talents and our lives, if we were willing to work fairly and diligently.”   That’s pretty basic stuff, a pretty good recipe for a fruitful life, the kind Jerry McGee has lived.

I agree with him that we are marked indelibly – for good or ill -- by the places of our lives, especially at our beginnings.  Young folks who are fortunate enough to grow up in the Roberdels of the world have the advantage of villages that care, that nurture, that teach by example.  They may not always do the right thing, but it won’t be because they didn’t know what the right thing was.  And chances are, they’ll do a lot of things that are right, because they grew up among folks who expected just that.

I share Jerry McGee’s good fortune of having grown up in a good village.  Mine was a small Alabama town populated by the same kind of folks who lived in Roberdel in Jerry McGee’s youth.  We kids knew that people in our village cared for us and thought we were special and showed us by their example how to live good lives.  They let us know in no uncertain terms that they expected good things of us.  That makes a difference.

Roberdel lies along the banks of Hitchcock Creek, and when you leave Roberdel, you cross a bridge that is named for Jerry McGee.  The community is proud of him, and he’s proud of being one of Roberdel’s sons.  He says he’s crossed that bridge many times leaving Roberdel, but his heart is still there.  Good places are like that -- places you never really leave, even when you’re far away.  Dorothy was right.

The Intersection of Art and Commerce

A fellow said to me the other day, “I’ve got a great idea for a book.  How do I get it published?”  Whoa dude, I replied – or words to that effect.  To get a book published, you first have to have a book.  Then, and only then, do you even think about publishing.  That is the point where art meets commerce.

I get a lot of questions about publishing from folks who know I’ve written some stuff and had it published.  My first question is always, “Have you written the book?”  Sometimes, they want me to write the book for them.  Well, I don’t do that.  But I’m happy to share what little wisdom I have about writing, along with lots of encouragement.

The best wisdom I can share is what a graduate school professor gave to me.  He said, “The way you write is to apply the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.”  There are lots of folks with good stories to tell, and many have a facility with words that would allow them to put the story on paper.  But only a few will apply the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

There are a several tough parts along the way.  The first is simply getting started – sitting down in a quiet place and facing a blank piece of paper that’s waiting for words.  Once you leap that hurdle, the next one is when you read what you’ve just written and say, “Oh, that’s awful!”  Well, maybe it is.  But the remedy is doing it again and making it better.  If you want it to be perfect the first time, you’re doomed.  What you do is get something down, and then re-write.  The getting it down is the toughest part.  The re-writing is where you begin to have fun.

But maybe the hardest part is the absolute requirement for stubborn, patient persistence.  Going to the work every possible day you can, carving out slices of time during which you absolutely refuse to be interrupted or distracted.  A good story, worked on daily, takes on a life of its own, a momentum.  And keeping that momentum is crucial through the long process of making a book.

Only when you’ve done all of that are you ready to think about publishing.  This is the intersection of art and commerce.  A writer is not complete without a reader.  We want as many folks as possible to enjoy and appreciate what we’ve done.  So we go through the tough process of finding a publisher, or publishing ourselves, and then reaching out to the widest possible audience.

The reaching out is hard work, too.  It’s hawking the merchandise, and that means using every possible means to let people know about the work and why they should pay their hard-earned money to obtain it.  Published writers today  know how crucial it is to use social media to get the word out, how important it is to go to places where readers gather, how necessary it is to work tirelessly and persistently in behalf of sales.  Crass commercialism?  You betcha.  Without the commerce part, the art part just lays there.

The good news about publishing is that today, anyone and everyone who produces a work can get published, thanks to the rise of the e-book: Amazon’s Kindle and the like.  Those folks are delighted to have you publish your work on their platforms, and I know from experience that it’s easy to do.  But just because it’s there doesn’t mean anybody will actually buy it and read it.  That’s the writer’s job.

I suppose any successful business is run by people who understand the intersection of art and commerce.  Just because you produce a good product or service doesn’t mean you’ll do well.  You have to do the grubby commercial part too.

We writers are no different.  Stop in the middle of an intersection and you’ll get run over.  You have to keep moving.

My Wife The Golf Caddy

The professional golfer Adam Scott is looking for a new caddy, and I’d like to recommend my wife Paulette.

Adam Scott is a superb golfer, ranked Number 2 in the world, winner of multiple events on the PGA tour including the Master’s.  His most recent caddy, Steve Williams, has gone into semi-retirement, and as expected, Adam has been deluged with folks who want to carry his bag.  Several hundred, in fact, including one fellow from Florida who wrote to say he lives with his Mom, but thought caddying for Adam would be lots of fun.   So Adam can have his pick of good caddies, but as he’s going through the candidates, I hope he’ll give careful consideration to Paulette.

Here are some things I think recommend Paulette:

1.  Paulette is very good at giving directions, even about things that don’t fall into her areas of expertise.  I well remember a trip we took to England a few years ago.  I’m behind the wheel of an unfamiliar car, driving on the left-hand side of the road, trying to keep from having a terrible accident.  Our daughter Lee is sitting white-knuckled in the passenger seat, being mostly quiet, and Paulette is in the back, giving directions without benefit of map.  English drivers appear to be giving us a wide berth, as if there is a neon sign on the hood of the car that says, Dumb American With Directional Wife.  Avoid At All Costs.  I have a rather severe headache.  Paulette is undeterred.  Now, is this a strike against Paulette as Adam Scott’s caddy?  I think not.  Adam Scott is from Australia, he knows how to drive on the left-hand side of the road, and a golf bag is not an automobile.  Paulette can bring some decisiveness to Adam’s golf game.  “Should I hit a 7-iron or a 6-iron, Paulette?”  Without hesitation: “The 6, Adam.  And don’t mess up.”

1. Paulette is a veteran traveler.  She has been to Russia, China, Italy, Poland, Israel, England, and France, and most recently, the Czech Republic and Germany.  There are golf tournaments in all of those countries, and Adam Scott plays in many of them.  Paulette knows how to pack for overseas trips, can count money in foreign currencies, and enjoys sampling local cuisine.  She would be a great help to Adam Scott the world traveler.  She is good at giving directions in unfamiliar places (see above).  She doesn’t speak foreign languages, but she says that the only words you need to know in another country are “Visa” and “Master Card.”

2. Paulette can ride a Segway – you know, those motorized contraptions that look like a pogo stick with wheels.  She learned to ride a Segway on a trip to Israel awhile back, and I think there is the potential here to revolutionize the golf game.  I can’t see Paulette toting a heavy golf bag for 18 holes 4 days in a row, but I can easily see her carting Adam’s bag around on a Segway.  With her powers of persuasion, I think she could convince the PGA tour to equip caddies with Segways.  It would be much easier on the caddies physically and would extend their careers.  Plus, it would make great TV.
    

I hope Adam Scott will hold off making this important decision in his professional life until he has time to consider Paulette’s many fine qualities, including the three mentioned above.  I believe he’s ready to take his career to the next level.  All he needs is a firm hand, an experienced traveler, and a good Segway driver.  Ah, you say, does Paulette know anything about golf?  Well, she is fond of saying, “Golf is my friend.”  Okay, she means it gets me out of the house.  But it’s a start.

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 Kindle e-reader.

We'd Better Speak Up For Libraries

Some friends in a community not too far from mine told me the story of a candidate for local political office a couple of years ago who said, at a candidate forum, “I think people who use the library ought to pay for it.  I never go in there.”  This candidate got elected, along with some others of like mind, and sure enough, when it came time to pass a budget, library money was drastically slashed.

The impact was immediate and drastic.  The library had to lay off workers and cut operating hours.  When folks who needed the library’s resources showed up, they often found the doors closed, or no staff member available to help and answer questions.

Looking for a job to support your family?  Good luck being able to use a library computer to look up online job listings.  A student working on a term paper that requires current reference material?  Good luck getting access in the evening or on a weekend.  Looking for that new book by your favorite author?  Sorry, the library doesn’t have money to buy it.   

The impression I got from my friends is that the frustration level is high, and that a grassroots effort is underway to get library funds restored.  I hope they’re successful.  Like me, they share the view that a library is an essential community service, just like police and fire protection, the health department, road maintenance, garbage pickup, etc.  I think of a library as a vital part of the school system, which in its broadest term includes adults as well as young folks.

I would not be a writer if it were not for the influence of the library in my hometown as I was growing up.  It was a modest operation, a single room tucked between the fire station and the city clerk’s office, staffed by a dear woman named Miss Glennie.  She was not a trained librarian in the modern sense, but she knew every book in the place, and she was an ardent advocate of reading.  She challenged me by pushing good literature on me, had me reading Faulkner and Hemingway when I was in junior high.  Those books not only entertained me, they taught me what good writing looked like.  Those books, and Miss Glennie, helped shape the writer I would become.

Libraries have changed a lot since my youth, when they were mostly places where you put books on shelves and patrons came in and checked them out.  They’re now firmly in the grasp of the digital age, and much of what they hold is accessed through a keyboard, a collection of knowledge -- much of it sight and sound -- that has to be updated at lightning speed.  But in the broadest sense, the role of the library hasn’t changed.  It’s a repository of the community’s wisdom, there for every soul in the community to use.

No community service exists unless the people in the community insist on it, work for it, and support decision-makers who share their views.  I don’t think we’re inclined to let crime run unchecked, houses burn down, garbage pile up at the curb, or ceilings fall in at the schoolhouse.  The question is, do we also think knowledge and wisdom are important?  If we do, we’ll back our libraries to the hilt. 

Guest Blog: A Good Day For The Book

My guest blogger today is Stephen Doster, author of a fine new novel, Jesus Tree.
 

      Around Nashville you occasionally see a “Save The Book” bumper sticker, courtesy of Parnassus Books, a local bookseller started by Karen Hayes and Ann Patchett after a major independent bookseller folded.  The phrase, “Save The book,” stirs up a lot of connotations.  In the 140-character world of Twitter and text-speak, some people fret for the future of the written word.  Cell phone novels, written entirely as text messages, began in Japan in 2003 and spread to other countries at a rate that makes Ebola blush (LOL).  E-readers and e-books threaten to make paperbacks and hardcovers a thing of the past.  So, what about the book as we know it?  Will it survive?  Will we be a literate or a semi-literate society?

      I don’t know the answer to that.  But I do know that October 11, 2014 was a good day for “the book.”  In fact, it was a good day for a lot of books.  On that day I attended another author panel session at the Southern Festival of Books, an annual three-day love fest for authors, publishers, and most importantly, readers, not e-readers but the actual flesh-and-blood variety.  The festival encompasses three large edifices – the main library, the state capitol, and the legislative building.  There are numerous author sessions occurring every hour of the festival for three days. 

      Saturday, October 11th was also the day #2 ranked Auburn Tigers played #3 ranked Mississippi State Bulldogs in college football – in the South, where Nashville happens to be located.  It was a wet, overcast day, and I was going to an end-of-the day, closing session.  But I had been to this festival before on a workday Friday, on an SEC football Saturday, and on an NFL (Titans in town) Sunday, and there had always been a good turnout for “the book.”  But was that still the case?  After all, e-books had another year to undermine “the book” since the 2013 festival. 

      The room I was going to was on the third floor of Nashville’s impressive marble and stone library.  The 3:00 o’clock session was ending (packed room – a good sign!), and people were gathering outside the room for the last panel.

      This particular session was titled, “The Evolution of the Southern Short Story,” featuring authors Suzzane Hudson, David Madden, and H. William (Bill) Rice.  Before the session began, Belmont University Professor Devon Boan, the moderator, was discussing Bill’s book in-depth.  “It’s nice when a moderator has actually read the book!” the author said.  Welcome to the Southern Festival of Books. 

      During the session, the authors read passages from their books.  Madden acted his out in a one-man play.  Afterward, the audience members peppered them with questions.  The discussion ranged from the evolution of short stories, or lack thereof, to post-humanism in Southern literature.  Wow.  Really?  Auburn is playing Mississippi State, and we’re talking post-humanism?  Full disclosure:  I didn’t follow all of that segment of the discussion, but the fact it was going down in the South, on an SEC football Saturday, was encouraging.

      But it gets better.  After this session, I followed Devon and the authors to Legislative Plaza where the author signing area is located.  I stopped to buy books and then made my way up the steps to the author tables in the still overcast and dreary afternoon with evening closing in.  The three authors were at the same table signing books.  Suzanne and Bill autographed their copies for me, then I got in David’s line.  David knows a lot of people.  A big guy was standing next to him talking to Devon and David as he signed books.  When I got closer, the big guy reached out his hand and said, “Hi.  I’m Pat Conroy.  Nice to meet you.”
      Pat Conroy was the keynote for the book festival and had been signing books for two hours before we got there.  And there he was, still talking to authors and fans, and chatting with people like me, like we’re family.  Then he said something I’ve always thought when attending this festival but never expressed.  He looked out over the tables with authors from other sessions and the lines of people waiting to have their books signed.  He spread his arms, taking it all in, and he said three words.  “Isn’t this great?”
      Yes, Pat Conroy, this is great.  On a wet, overcast, SEC football Saturday, at day’s end, people still discuss books (post-humanism and all), they still buy books, and they still line up to have their favorite authors sign those books. 
    A good day for the book?  It was a great day for the book.

An Abiding Sense of History

It was a beautiful and memorable October 7th atop Kings Mountain.  Several hundred gathered to observe the 234th anniversary of the battle that turned the tide of the Revolutionary War and set in motion the chain of events that led to America’s independence from Britain.

It was a colorful occasion – men and women dressed in period costumes, members of the Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution and other organizations dedicated to preserving the history and legacy of this important piece of Americana.  They laid wreaths at the base of the monument that pays tribute to the Patriots who fought, including the 28 who died.

The gathering included a handful of hardy men who had spent two weeks traveling to Kings Mountain from Eastern Tennessee, re-creating the march of the “Overmountain Men” who formed the backbone of the Patriot force at the battle.  Those originals traveled more than 300 miles over rugged terrain, through brutal weather, to find and defeat British Major Patrick Ferguson and his force on that low ridge near the border of the two Carolinas.  The modern-day group have been making this journey for 40 years, stopping along the way to tell anyone who can listen the story of those 1780 frontiersmen.

I’m one who thinks history is vital – that we have to know where we came from, and how we got where we are now, to have any idea how to proceed into the future.  When I write a novel, I need to know my characters’ backstory – the how and why of their journey to the “now.”  I want my readers to understand the baggage they tote along with them, the joys and agonies of their lives that make them who they are and give a glimpse into how they might deal with their present dilemmas.

So, we all fit into a history – both personal and societal.  And having a sense of that is crucial to understanding who we are, as individuals and as a people.

I love the stories of history.  In the research that went into writing my new play, “Liberty Mountain,” I read volumes about the settling of the Carolinas, the lives of the families who came to the southern colonies from Europe to make a fresh start, to work hard and enjoy the fruits of their labor, to worship as they pleased.  It’s the ordinary folks I’m most interested in, and in crafting the story of Kings Mountain, I came to know these ordinary folks – men, women and children – and especially the volunteer citizen militiamen who fought the battle on both sides.  They had an intensely personal stake in the outcome, and when it was over, they went back to being farmers and millers and shopkeepers.  But they were profoundly changed by the experience, and so was the country.  The difference was one word: liberty.

At the wreath-laying ceremony on top of the mountain a few days ago, I was heartened to see a large group of high school students.  Their presence told me that folks at their school believe that history is important.  I trust that the experience made a lasting impression on the young folks, because we depend on them to carry our history and its lessons forward.  We put it in their hands, and trust they will continue to tell the stories of who we are and how we came to be Americans.  If they understand that, it will help them shape their future.

I hope my play, “Liberty Mountain,” will play a small part in perpetuating the unique piece of history we call Kings Mountain.  The production will continue in the future, with performances every summer.  I hope folks, especially young folks, will come from across the nation – even the world – to see and hear this inspiring story of courage and fortitude. 

On The Air With Swap Shops and Obituaries

I took a trip to my past a few days ago, and it’s worth telling about.  I was interviewed at the studios of a radio station in Cherryville, North Carolina about the upcoming premier of my new play, “Liberty Mountain,” and it was like going home.

I began my long journey as a communicator in junior high school at the weekly newspaper in my Alabama hometown – first working in the print shop, then learning to report and write.  But when a fellow started a radio station in Elba, I was intrigued.  There was a minister who, as a part-time job, did local news for the station, and he invited me to contribute stories – not just write them, but deliver them on the air.  So a couple of mornings a week, before school, I would go to his pastor’s study where he had a microphone set up, and I would present my stuff.  Wow!  My family and friends could hear me on the radio.  Instant celebrity.  I acquired a new girlfriend.

Then the station manager offered me a job as a disk jockey – working after school, weekends, and summer vacation.  From pastor’s study to studio, operating the control board, reading the news and commercials, and playing records, an inordinate number of which I dedicated to my new girlfriend.  We played “Top 4O” music – Ray Charles, the Platters, Johnny Cash, cool stuff.  My air name was “The Boogie Man.”

I parlayed that experience at WELB (“the mighty 1350) into a college education, disc jockeying my way through the University of Alabama at stations in Tuscaloosa while I got a communications degree.  And from there I went on to a thirty-year career in television news at stations in Montgomery and Charlotte.

But I never lost my affection and admiration for hometown radio, and as I sat in that studio in Cherryville, it all came back.  Just before we went on the air for the interview, they were doing the “Swap Shop,” a staple of hometown radio.  Want to buy or sell an item?  Send in a post card or call on the phone and get on the air.  Connect with your friends and neighbors, one of whom may be on the lookout for that “Sly and the Family Stone” vinyl LP you have for sale or may have that two-gallon crockpot you’ve been pining for.  It’s an electronic community flea market, free for users.

And then there’s the “Obituary Column of the Air,” another time-honored hometown radio tradition.  Obits provided by the local funeral home, read somberly by an announcer, a brief chronicle of the lives of those among us recently departed, along with information on services, memorial gifts, and the like.  In a small town, you’re likely to know the folks they’re talking about.  Family, friends and neighbors.

Radio has changed a good deal since my days as a teenage deejay.  Stations – especially in sizeable markets – are owned by big conglomerates with cookie-cutter ideas about what folks ought to be listening to.  In many cases, programming is automated and the live announcer personality has been swallowed up by a computer.  But search around the AM dial, and you’ll still find echoes of that very local, very intimate radio of the past.  The best of it remains, and for a small-town kid like me, it’s the best radio there is.  It’s my roots, and I’m grateful.

Robert Inman’s novels – Home Fires Burning, Old Dogs and Children, Dairy Queen Days, Captain Saturday, and The Governor Lady – are available on Amazon Kindle, priced at $3.99.

Scotland Speaks To America

I’ve been following Scotland’s vote on independence with more than passing interest.  Like many folks who live in the Carolinas, I have Scots-Irish ancestors, folks who came to America in its very early years to build new lives, raise families, work hard, and worship as they pleased.  America is a land of immigrants, and this particular group played a significant role in making the nation we are today.

In my new play, “Liberty Mountain,” our theatre company brings to life their settling in America and how they got caught up in the colonies’ struggle for independence.  It focuses on 1780, when the British were winning the war until the decisive battle at Kings Mountain, along the border between the two Carolinas.  Had a hastily-assembled force of Patriots not defeated a larger and better-trained Loyalist contingent there, the result of the war for independence might have had a far different outcome.

So when kinsmen back in Scotland start talking about independence, it strikes home.  Their question: should they dissolve the union with Great Britain they entered more than 300 years ago?  The answer, a fairly resounding “No.”  Great Britain will remain intact, though Scotland – in the course of the campaign – was promised significantly more autonomy.  Our Scots are proud and independent people, and they will enjoy a greater ability to govern themselves as they retain their economic and cultural ties to Britain.

I read a lot about the campaign as it was going on, listened a lot to the BBC on the radio.  And a couple of things struck me that may say something to Americans, whether Scots-Irish descendants or not.

The first was the relative civility of the campaign.  There were passionate arguments on both sides – opinions staunchly held and forcefully voiced.  Those who favored independence believed that Scotland would be better off in every way, especially economically, by going it alone.  Those who urged a “no” vote feared that dis-union would bring all sorts of problems, especially economically.  Leaders of the two sides debated fiercely, as did the voters.  But with a few exceptions, the whole thing was conducted with remarkable good manners.  Perhaps the Scots realized that whatever the outcome, they had to live together, and that it would be best to do so without lingering bitterness.

Contrast that with our American campaigns of the past couple of decades.  Whether considering issues or candidates, we seem unable to avoid hurling insults at each other, indulging in character assassination, and on the whole being profoundly negative about the business.  It’s not enough that we disagree, we are bent on demonizing each other.  In the aftermath of our campaigns, the divisions linger and grow.  We become increasingly unable to agree on much of anything, and become increasingly ungovernable.  The Scots must look at us and shake their heads.

The other thing about the Scottish election that caught my fancy was the fact that – for the first time in history – 16- and 17-year-olds were eligible to vote.  At the outset, the common assumption was that a bunch of flaky, rebellious, hot-headed teenagers would vote for independence, relying more on hormones than reason.  Quite the opposite happened.  Overwhelmingly, Scottish teenagers approached the vote with sober reason.  They listened, they read, they debated among themselves.  They were informed voters.  And in the days leading up to the vote, polls showed the youth electorate inclined to vote to stay with Great Britain, perhaps concerned with their own economic futures.  Since the outcome was 55% to stay, it’s safe to say the teenagers had a significant role in the result.  Now, having conducting themselves so admirably in a campaign of issues, it will be hard to keep them away from the polls when choosing who will represent them.

It’s something we might think about in America.  Would our 16- and 17-year-olds rise to the challenge if presented with the opportunity to cast a meaningful vote in an election?  I personally think they would.  Perhaps it’s worth trying.

I’m not ready to move to Scotland.  I’m perfectly happy right where I am, in the America that my Scots-Irish ancestors fought to liberate.  It is an imperfect union, but it’s our union.  But could we look to Scotland today for some inspiration as we try to make our union better?  Absolutely.

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.