A Listening Thing

Some time ago, as winter slipped away into spring, William Michaelian asked if I would interview him for the tenth anniversary edition of his novel, A Listening Thing (Cosmopsis Books, 2011).

William is a force to be reckoned with, a great, eccentric ball of energy who publishes his writing and art in book form and on the internet. He blogs every day at Recently Banned Literature.

Our friendship goes back to the early days of The Teacher’s View when William contacted me about my review of Aram Saroyan’s poetry. He has become a source of wisdom in my life, and simply through our discussions, he has made me a better human being. Reluctantly, I must share him with a myriad of readers, writers, and artists around the globe who have discovered William’s incredible work as well as his deeply soulful insights into life and the human condition. I consider his friendship a blessing, pure and simple.

He sent me copies of his books and I found his writing riveting and beautiful. My favorite of his published works is The Painting of You (Author’s Press Series Volume I, 2009), a collection of poems, essays, and literary fragments detailing his mother’s descent into Alzheimer’s Disease. The book serves as William’s account of his round-the-clock care of her and his meditation on the fragile, often ephemeral joy and sadness of this life. In the tragic loss of a parent’s mental stability, one might not expect to find optimism and beauty, but it is there on every page, giving us as much a celebration of what was as an elegy for what is passing away.

It is difficult to pick favorites with William’s work. It is an embarrassment of riches. However, when he sent me one of his collector’s copies of the galley proof of A Listening Thing, I knew I’d found a classic. I was shocked to learn the history of his novel, the almost publication, the bankrupt publisher, acclaim so close yet so far. But what a book, indeed.

As I enter mid-life and realize there are fewer days ahead than there are behind, I find deep resonance with Stephen Monroe, the central character of A Listening Thing: regrets, mistakes, and like all of William’s work, a profound sense of the beauty of life and the hope intrinsic in each new year, each new day. The book is wise and sad and joyful like its creator.

I am also proud to have been offered the chance to co-author the interview William and Cosmopsis Books included in this new edition. My goal in taking on the assignment was to get out of William’s way and let him tell his story. I wanted to observe literary journalist Joan Didion’s rule to be the “least important person in the room.” I sent William a set of questions. He refined, sharpened, and then answered them. I followed up and offered a few additional topics. William shaped and integrated the material together. When I came to write the introduction to the finished interview, I nearly quit my writing career then and there. What could I say to match William’s words and his novel? I felt his hand on my shoulder. Just write, I heard him say. Words have never failed me, and they remained true on this project as well. The finished piece is included along with some new words from William. And of course, Stephen Monroe’s story is complete in this authorized print edition.

Fiction has the power to create a make believe world that resonates in our reality. William himself has often posed the question, what is real and what is dream life, and he has taken the opportunity in many of his works to explore the nature of reality, to push against the often blurry line between what is real and imagined. A Listening Thing will bring you into the fictional world of Stephen Monroe’s interior monologue, but it is ourselves we will find on the page. I invite you to embark on a journey, and like Odysseus returning, you will come to know yourself a little better upon reaching the end of Stephen’s story. In reading William’s work, that is the promise and the treasure.



For a complete list of William Michaelian's books in print, go to his website here.

The Grammarian

I am performing my yearly ritual as school starts: cleaning out my files. I happened upon a gem. The article was a Los Angeles Times obituary from February 18, 2005. Eleanor Gould Packard, grammarian for The New Yorker magazine for 54 years, was dead on that day at age 87.

In my life as a teacher, I have been deeply disturbed by my colleagues’ and students’ disrespect for grammar. Nouns, verbs, active voice, pronoun-antecedent agreement—these are the building blocks of our language. When grammatically correct, writing has a symmetry and beauty that supports meaning and nuance. Teachers disparage it—grammar is pointless when it’s taught in a vacuum, they say. Teaching whole writing is better. The bottom line is, they can’t teach it. It does not lend itself to touchy-feely writing assignments that stress putting down feelings, putting down anything, really, on paper. Corrections to grammar and spelling come later, they tell their students, if they come at all. Grades are awarded for writing something, not for a grammatically correct, logically sound argument of an idea.

Teaching grammar is hard work. There is a right and a wrong answer. The rules are concrete, and must be committed to memory or looked up when needed. And yes, the teaching of grammar must be connected to writing so students can learn the rules and then apply them as they revise their papers. Students must learn that when writing is grammatically correct, logically sound, coherently developed, the essay soars. It is a thing of beauty and a joy forever, to borrow from the poet John Keats.

As a writer, I strive for correctness with grammar. I actually become angry when I catch a mistake in my work. I consider it a ding to my credibility. How we speak and write indicates our level of education, as my teachers taught me.

But I wasn’t always a receptive student.

In high school, we had a separate class in grammar, and only grammar. We did no writing at all. Our assignments each day were to complete all the exercises in the Warriner’s Complete Course grammar text. I had yet to realize I was headed for a life of words and sentences. I slouched in the back of the room and either slept through class or lured flies to land on my open book so I could squash them between the pages. Later, when I made tentative forays into writing, I looked up how things were done in the books I was reading. I learned much grammar from those writers—Louis L’Amour, Mark Twain, and John Knowles, among others.

As a teacher preparing my first grammar-writing classes, I realized some of those lessons from the fly-filled, drowsy days had actually seeped into my brain. Teaching made me a student of grammar, finally.

All of these memories came flooding back due to a newspaper clipping in a file. Eleanor Gould Packer “read every nonfiction article scheduled for publication. She saw the galley proof after the assigning editor, fact checker, copy editor, and lawyer went through it. She still found reasons to fill margins with questions and comments.”

The obit goes on to quote Packard: “I do grammar, I go for sensible sentences, I avoid awkwardness, avoid ambiguity, try to make a thing hang together.”

In her margin notes to writers, she was all vinegar and spice: “This clear? (not to me).” Or, in challenging an assertion: “How so?” And when catching an error, she wrote the unequivocal “NOT grammar.” She even had a sense of humor: “Have we completely lost our mind?” she wrote in response to an error in logic.

In her 54 years at the magazine, she rarely took a day off, inexplicably woke up deaf one morning, and retired in 1999 after a stroke. She was one tough contrarian grammarian. We should all be so diligent and meticulous as writers, and especially, as teachers.



Photo: Eleanor Gould Packard as photographed by Sara Krulwich for The New York Times.

New Digs, New Year

Here are some shots from my first week back on campus in my new office.  It's a small piece of real estate, but it is all mine.  Now all I need are my writing students.

By the way, anyone want to take a shot at identifying the writers and artists on the board?

Deep in the Heart of Texas

A thousand lifetimes ago, I believed with all my heart that I would be a musician. The impulse began in childhood with the accordion, and later, the piano and percussion. It took me halfway through college as a music major to realize the music life was not for me, but I was left with some indelible memories. One such memory occurred when I was nearing the end of my freshman year in high school. The year was successful, and I felt as if I had found my niche in the difficult hierarchy of secondary education—not an athlete, but I had a front row seat at all the football games, and I was part of the percussion section, the coolest subgroup within the band.

In April, the band traveled to San Antonio, Texas for the annual Battle of the Flowers Festival, an event that commemorated the much-mythologized siege of the Alamo during the Texas War of Independence in the 1830s.

We arrived in San Antonio for some sightseeing leading up to our performance on a Thursday evening at an open air stadium in front of thousands of screaming fans. In marching band lore, this kind of performance is called a field show, and consists of formations and music on a football field, similar to a halftime show. I had never performed in front of such a large crowd, and the energy of the audience was like a drug. We were singing, screaming, and cheering all the way back to the hotel.

On Friday, we were scheduled to march in the Battle of the Flowers parade through downtown San Antonio. We arrived on time at the staging area, a large empty parking lot under a curving freeway overpass one block from the start of the parade. We were to be the third group to step off, with a local band and a float ahead of us. The drumline gathered under the overpass to warm up. We played through our exercises, taking great pleasure in the sheer cacophony of the thunderous drums echoing off the concrete above us. Across the parking lot were the backs of all the shops lining the parade route. As we pounded through our warm-ups, I kept trying to see between the buildings, wondering if the first band was off and running.

I remember glancing around at the other bands watching us warm up. I remember people milling about, some in parade costumes—clown suits, matadors, Spanish dancers. When I looked back toward the buildings along the parade route, a good seventy-five yards across burning asphalt, I saw hundreds of people running toward us. The looks on their faces could only be described as panic-stricken. Mothers were clutching children and literally dragging them along. I motioned to the other drummers to stop playing. The wave of humanity advanced toward us, and I began to feel a rush of adrenaline. All I heard were their screams.

The wave of humanity engulfed, and then passed us. Almost immediately, we became aware of another sound. Pops and deeper, more resonant explosions purpled the air, sounding at first like firecrackers, but then we heard the whacking slap of something repeatedly striking the concrete above us. I recognized the whine of a ricochet: bullets were flying. The band director yelled for us to drop our instruments and run after the crowd. We all made it around the corner of a building and down into a loading dock area between two tractor-trailers. At least a hundred people crowded and crouched in the bright sunlight. Next to me, a woman cradled her child in her arms, sobbing softly. I began hearing sirens in the distance.

The gunfire increased exponentially, and I could tell that there were now multiple shooters by the sound of the different caliber of weapons. With each sharp volley, people ducked reflexively, praying the bullets were not headed our way. Across the top of the loading dock was a sign: The Lone Star Brewery.

“He’s coming,” someone screamed.

A policeman sprinted around the corner of one of the trucks. “Gun, gun, gun,” he shouted.

In mass, the sea of people flooded under the trailer. The woman with child was caught up by the crowd like a piece of driftwood in a wave. I watched as her head slammed into the rigging under the trailer and she went down. Several people surrounded her to prevent the others from trampling her. When they pulled her to her feet on the other side of the trailer, she was bleeding profusely from a head wound.

We crossed an alley lined with police officers and entered into the walled courtyard of the brewery. The policemen shouted at us to get inside and stay near the brick walls. After the last person entered, the heavy iron doors were pulled closed. The barrage of gunfire continued less than a block away, and now helicopters hovered overhead. The band gathered around the director in one corner of the courtyard where he took a roll call to make sure no one was missing. Miraculously, we had all made it inside.

The gunfire continued, sporadically, and various rumors spread through the huge crowd of people: there were multiple gunmen; there was one gunman; he was firing from a camper in a gas station on the parade route; the first band to step off was directly in front of him and suffered casualties; and, tear gas was being used to pry him out of his hiding place. We had no choice but to sit around and wait. Someone provided water, and allowed us to be escorted individually to a bathroom inside the brewery.

The standoff lasted several hours, and culminated in a massive barrage of gunfire and explosions. Whatever was going on, it sounded like the Battle of the Bulge. As the sun started to go down, the band director moved us through the beer factory and out the other side to our buses. Most of our instruments were still back in the parking lot, but he told us they would be retrieved later.

Once back at our hotel, we were told to go to our rooms and wait to be called for a meeting. My three roommates and I sat in stunned silence, the TV and air conditioner on, watching the story we had just experienced firsthand unfold on the evening news.

The shooter was a 65 year old man named Ira Attebury. This was the third year he had attended the festival and parade, parking his camper in a paid spot outside a tire store eighteen feet from the intersection where the parade was to begin. He told neighbors that he would attend the festival and then embark on a multi-state vacation in his RV. Family members said he had become paranoid recently, fearing the police were following him. Whatever the case, at one p.m. on Friday, April 27, 1979, Attebury kicked open the door of his trailer and began firing one of six high caliber rifles at the 4000-5000 people lining the parade route in front of him. Witnesses said he shouted “Traitors, traitors, traitors,” and “What kind of a society is this,” as he fired into the crowds scrambling to take cover. Ida Long, age 26, and Amalia Castillo, 48, were killed. Thirty-two people were injured by direct gunfire, bullet or shrapnel fragments, or flying glass. Twenty were hurt in the resulting melee. Six policemen were also shot. After thirty minutes, a police officer managed to wound Attebury while he was reloading one of his weapons. Officers surrounded the now quiet camper and unloaded a barrage of bullets and tear gas into the vehicle hoping to finish the job. When the smoke cleared, Attebury was dead, possibly from a self-inflicted bullet wound in the head. Investigators said he had an arsenal of weapons and enough ammo for a war.

The following evening, we were scheduled to march in a night parade along the exact same route where the shooting occurred. Each band member would have strings of lights powered by a small battery pack attached to his or her uniform and instruments. We would all be fully outlined in lights as we marched down the boulevard. Most of us believed we would be heading home after the tragedy, but the director made a startling announcement. We would do the night parade. Police officers would line the route, and all attendees would be screened and searched before taking their seats on the street. Law enforcement, parade officials, and our teachers believed the shooting was the work of a lone, crazed gunman, and that we would be safe with all the security now deployed on the parade route. I was truly fearful, as were many of the other members. Our bodies would be outlined in lights; what better targets would a shooter have?

The next night, we arrived at the parking lot and suited up for the parade. I did not think many people would show up to watch the parade after what happened, but I was wrong. The crowds seemed larger than the day before, with people wildly cheering and screaming as we lined up at the fateful intersection to step off. As we marched the parade route, several people threw firecrackers into the street, and it took strength to fight the urge to panic and run. Cops swarmed the areas from where the fireworks were thrown. A man also ran through our ranks screaming, which unnerved all of us, but he was quickly surrounded and carted off.

At the end of the parade route, we stripped down our equipment and packed up. All of us were drenched in sweat as much from the humidity of a spring San Antonio night as well as from nerves. We boarded the bus and went for a late dinner of pizza near the hotel. By the time we arrived at the restaurant, we were screaming and cheering again. We had made it, and we were happy. The fear and trepidation vanished and we made jokes and told stories about what we saw and experienced. Death had touched us, but we had lived to tell the tale. We were invincible, as only young people believe they are.


Read more about this incident from other accounts here, here, and here.

A Day In California

A Day in California from Ryan Killackey on Vimeo.

Just one more time lapse film, I promise.  This one is by Ryan Killackey with music, once again, by Cinematic Orchestra (seems they have the market cornered for time lapse music soundtracks).  Enjoy.

The Left Coast City of Light

LA Light from Colin Rich on Vimeo.


It took photographer Colin Rich six months to put together this montage of the lights of Los Angeles. It's a beautiful piece with haunting music by Cinematic Orchestra.

If Memory Serves

In the rapidly disappearing bookstores on the boulevards of America, the memoir has become as ubiquitous as rain. We can read the words and memories of autistic children, progeny of drunks and acrobats, the woman who made her way through Harvard by sleeping in the library. It is a rich and varied story, the memoir, shaped by elements of fiction and narrative, and often treading heavily on the border between truth and illusion. “This is my story, the way I saw it, the way I believe it happened to me, and if you don’t remember it that way, write your own book!”

Most readers do not realize that much of the overheated prose simmered in the juices of reflection can be traced back to one book:  Stop-Time by Frank Conroy (Penguin, 1977) originally published in 1967. The book was an instant classic, a finalist for the National Book Award. Conroy went on to write novels and essays, even doctored some screenplays, but he never achieved the level of success of his memoir. He became the director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop from 1987 to 2005. He was not, however, your typical academic or writer. He was an accomplished pianist, winning a Grammy in 1986, and he influenced generations who wandered the halls of the English-Philosophy Building on the Iowa campus. He died of colon cancer in 2005.

Stop-Time is not a story about writing, although writing plays a huge role in the book. Conroy gives us a life on the pages that could have gone either way—artist or criminal—and offers us a glimpse of the boy who barely escaped into adulthood. He forces the reader to engage in his story by utilizing, quite effectively, the narrative trick of fragmenting the frames of memory. Events pass by us, like the landscape rushing by the windows of a train, and if we do not pay attention, we miss out. He also does not stick to a strict chronological telling of his life story. But all of this makes the book evocative and involving, and demonstrates that Conroy, above all else, was a gifted writer. Moments are frozen in place like butterflies trapped in amber. He holds them up to the light to let us see the gossamer wings with the subtle and gross imperfections of the human condition.

Conroy is very good at capturing the non-sequitur nature of life, the seemingly random events and twists that we are left to puzzle over years later. Hindsight, the cliché goes, is twenty-twenty, but often even in the rearview mirror, we are tempted to look at scenes from the past and ask ourselves, “What the hell did that mean?” Conroy does an excellent job of letting the scenes speak and allowing the reader to create sense and meaning.

 
 
I came to read Frank Conroy’s memoir when I picked up a more recent book at the store, Mentor: A Memoir by Tom Grimes (Tin House Books, 2010). Grimes’ book is his reflections on the role Conroy played in his life as a father-figure and mentor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The two writers approach the subject of their lives very differently. After reading Conroy, I found Grimes’ take much more conventional. It unfolds in a more chronological manner, and focuses on the writing life. This is not to say that Mentor is flawed. It is an excellent study of what it means to be a writer, the sacrifices, the rejection, the mental health issues, the disappointments and rejections. Ultimately, though, it is a tribute to the power of a mentor in an artist’s life.

Grimes’ book is less fragmentary and episodic. If one is looking for inspiration and solace in the writing life, this is the book to read. Here is the writer’s manifesto: “This is why I write. It’s my way of controlling my world and my emotions. I focus on sentences. For several hours a day, nothing else matters. I live inside language. And while I’m often frustrated by writing’s difficulty, I’m also at peace.” Grimes, in one short set of sentences, defines the writer’s paradox.

Most gripping is Grimes’ account of his sister’s suicide attempts and his own downward spiral into depression and paranoia. Like his mentor, Grimes examines all facets of the memory, and does not hesitate to lay his own bloody soul on the table. His is an honest book, the kind of writing that leaves no shadows or darkness unexplored.

The writer’s life is difficult and uncertain. Grimes takes us through the maddening odyssey of getting a book published. Feast or famine is the rule, but even when feasting, the success is momentary and ephemeral. It is on to writing the next book, which might involve years of slaving away at the desk.

The most moving part of the book is when Grimes takes us through the end of Conroy’s life. Grimes now runs his own MFA program at a university in Texas, although his life is still deeply entwined with that of his mentor. They move from teacher-student, to father-son, to writer-to-writer, a deep communion of friendship and art. In one of his last calls to Conroy, the sick and dying mentor asks his former student, “You know I love you, right?” From the reserved and stoic Conroy, this is a major revelation, and Grimes struggles to find words to respond before the older man hangs up the phone. It is left to the student to sum up the relationship between the two men and their books: “I hadn’t expected to write this book,” Grimes says, “but, in a way, our memoirs form bookends. His about childhood, adolescence, and a lost father; mine about writing, teaching, and a father found. Our story has come full circle.”

Both books are excellent, full of emotion and insight. Writing a life is harder than writing a novel, but not by much. Frank Conroy and Tom Grimes do both, and we the readers are the richer.