Winter Hours Working Life

“What is autobiography but a story rich and impossible of completion—an intense, careful, expressive, self-interested failure? What can I say to you, therefore, that will be true, and will cast its shadow or its light over the whole body of my telling, of my being here, or who I am?”

-from Winter Hours by Mary Oliver

Essays and Poems:

Snow drifted like sand across the road in front of me. Our car felt lighter without the backseat weighed down by all the books my wife and I had culled from our shelves to prepare for our move. I wasn’t concerned that the rear tires would lose traction because I had driven in the Midwest for a half dozen winters.

Lauren had moved with me from our families in Florida to Iowa where I attended grad school and she got a job working at a nonprofit. After earning my MFA and marrying each other, we stayed. I struggled to find work beyond odd jobs. I feared the security of an office job that would cause me to not want to sit and write before or after work. I couldn’t live on my writing, or at least I couldn’t afford to write for an economic living. And I didn’t want to teach writing because I feared losing what I loved to do.

I had been frozen.

The car’s trunk was filled with a tarp, a ground pad, a sleeping bag, boots, and an external framed bright blue pack that I hadn’t used since crossing over from Cub to Boy Scouts by earning my Arrow of Light and then quitting in sixth grade. I was driving, alone, south to Missouri for a Wilderness First Responder course. I was about to begin a new path toward a non-seasonal job; it seemed like I was always getting a job that didn’t work out. The WFR course would complete my training for an environmental educator job out in Moab, Utah. The only thing I knew about the place was Edward Abbey’s cranky national park memoir Desert Solitaire where he wasn’t really alone; he just wrote his wife and child out of the book.

Underneath the road atlas on the empty passenger seat was a book I couldn’t help buying when I sold our books at a used store. It was a book that I read when I first started writing. A book by a living writer who was a poet but wrote prose in beautiful, quiet sentences that I would come to learn as lyrical. It was a book that began my writing life. A teal upper half of sky, between a navy sailboat cutting along the horizon on top of a turquoise half of sea.

*

The dust jacket was replaced by forest green vinyl. White Arial font stamped on the spine to read Oliver. The book sat on the poetry shelves back by the bathrooms in the University of Central Florida’s library. I probably picked the book because it was thin and our undergrad workshop class was reading Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook. We had to read several collections during the spring semester and then write a report after each one.

I still have a digital copy of my assignment on Oliver’s self analysis of her poem “The Swan.” I must have skipped Oliver’s first essay “Building a House”—a hard working piece about constructing a tiny shed from locally found scrap: a metaphor for writing a poem—and I doubt that I read the entire book, which is why I wanted to re-read my first encounter with Oliver, or rather, completely read Oliver and write back to that time in my life.

In my paper, I wrote that Oliver “held characteristics of a significant poem” with three musts—or as Oliver actually wrote, “rules”—for herself: 1.) genuine body, 2.) sincere energy, and 3.) spiritual purpose.

I didn’t consider that Oliver also wanted “the poem to ask something, and at its best moments, [she] want[s] the question to remain unanswered.” Oliver believes that a reader must answer the question.

I wrote that “The Swan” included concrete images (genuine body), its shape matched the motion of the animal (sincere energy), and that Oliver suggested heaven incarnate as imagination on earth (spiritual purpose). I don’t know if I knew what I was writing about.

When I read “The Swan” again in a basement apartment before my week-long WFR sessions I could see that Oliver had shaped her zigzagging enjambment like the floating little boat of a swan, or perhaps Shelley’s sailboat that Oliver laments capsizing in a final storm, drifting toward shore and the revelation of its hopeful landing as a joy of survival and the poem itself as an answer to what to do: live, and then write.

Rescue

What is forgiveness anyway but a terrifying and true opening—a dangerous, purposeful, affective, selfless vulnerability? What could Jakob say to us, right there, that would uncloak the shadow of death he had seen as he served in the oven of the continual Gulf war and took with him on the freezer of Antarctica, as we shared stories already dead and stories yet to live?

When the bloated body bobbed on the ocean, the face tight and white, and the helicopter’s rotors chopping the salty air, he knew the only thing he could do: plop down next to it, or hate. And he plopped, a gloop of a body made of water into a body of water, next to a body soggy with more water. He grasped that slick skin, so they both bobbed on the surface as a rope was flung out of the chopper. But the body did not know it was saved, or if it did its capacity to know was gone with whatever selfish will was gone, the body did not gasp like any living mammal hurled into water and only wanting air, that time was gone, and the body floundered in the ocean.

Years later, Jakob did not see the person in the water. In spite of the winch that hauled them both up where they had plunged in, the body wasn’t a person with a job, or hobbies, or family; it was a bag of meat and bones.

And I thought: I will need to remember that in the wilderness. The bobbing, the plopping, the grasping, and the hauling. Then the surrender of saving, of soul. Then the clear dryness of sanitizer. And the ocean: the depth and the apathy.

The Betrayer

From the beginning she had doubted. By from the beginning I mean as soon as we dated. It was terrible. At first I wondered, What is it? I would be driving, and she would be the passenger. As from the cold of space and unfathomable distance, not retuning but meteoring, the feeling rushed and entered and struck and embedded and settled and stayed.

Always, I wondered, How is she feeling about everything? What’s going on? She would write, I don’t know. I don’t want to hurt him. I gave my heart away before him. And line after line she wrote in her diary, betraying.

Do I know her? I think. I thought. Bangs and pubes. Hangry and frisky. Sadness and giddiness. Disappointment, too. And the commitment. And for all that, does she know me? Who is this person I married less than a year ago?

This dense, opaque, scared betrayer.

“You can have the other words—chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity. I’ll take grace. I don’t know what it is exactly, but I’ll take it.”

-from Winter Hours by Mary Oliver

Four Poets:

The circle of desk-chairs all faced inward. Every class we workshopped a couple of poems. We said what we thought the poem was about. We said whether we liked the poem or not, and why. We said how the student could improve the poem by breaking lines, swapping out words, or creating rhyme. We said we didn’t know if it was poem. We said, “This image is cliché.” We said, “This image is killer.” We agreed with each other. We disagreed with our instructor. We considered whether or not the poem needed to be confessional, lyrical, narrative, etc.

I turned in sentimental writing. I wrote a sonnet about leaving love notes under the windshield of an ex-girlfriend’s car. I wrote an elegy to my dead grandparents. I wrote a prose-poem about the poor infrastructure and daily grind of a city. I wrote a found poem with lines about God holding the world in His hands.

I remember four undergrads who wrote stellar poems, people who were poets—who inspired me to work at my writing—because they could work their imagination into funny, loving, nostalgic, and urgent writing: Matt Harrison—this sly, lip-pierced, too tight T-shirted, and jeaned guy—who satirically wrote “The One That Got Away” from the point-of-view of an old Ash Ketchum reminiscing about the battle that he lost to capture a Pokèmon. Christina Johnson—this small, quiet gal with sepia blouses that matched her Polaroid photos she took, and corduroy pants like a couch’s slipcover that I wanted to lie my head on—with her “Floral Prints” about a husband who reupholsters a yard sale armchair for his wife who ends up dying before he does and leaving her shape in the cushions. Keri Smith—this strong, but shy gal with a canvas of tattoos, before everyone inked up, down on her skin including beta fish swimming in the fish bowl of her clavicle, a horse skull on her bicep, a pizza slice melting on her shin, and a percolator on the other leg that spilled out the word bubble, “Death before decaf!”—who wove Lorca’s verse Ni hay nadie que, al tocar un recien nacido, olvide las inmoviles calaveras de caballo into her poem “A Death Full of Light” where she walked through her parents’ barn while remembering her little girl self who loved to ride. Curtis Meyer—this functioning Asperger’s guy with slick button ups and slacks, whose voice boomed like an oracle that he raised as a slam poet—and his poem “Value” that tallied all the lives of cells in our bodies that we are responsible for, and that to live isn’t, but actually really is, “no pressure.”

Four poets’ obsessions captivated Oliver and she, too, was inspired to write by their work: Poe’s uncertainty caused by the continual deaths of dark-curled, high-foreheaded, large-eyed, ill women so much like his mother, including his surrogate mother Frances Allan and later his wife (and cousin!) Virginia Clemm who revisited him in “The Haunted Palace.” Frost’s bittersweet control with meter, and fame, as he was put on a pedestal as a Popular Poet (capital Ps!) for being a pastoral poet with a vulnerability written in “My November Guest.” Hopkins’ release from the rigorous Jesuit order with joyful language (rejoice!) on the page where he was constantly “Hurrahing in Harvest.” Whitman (oh, Whitman! her Whitman!) who after caring for the dying as a nurse in the Civil War replicated a miracle of resurrection with his life long rewriting of Leaves of Grass.

“Once I came upon two angels, they were standing quietly, keeping guard beside a car. Light streamed from them, and a splash of flames lay quietly under their feet. What is one to do with such moments, such memories, but cherish them? Who knows what is beyond the known? And if you think that any day the secret of light might come, would you not keep the house of your mind ready?”

-from Winter Hours by Mary Oliver

Intermission:

Sand Dabs Seven*

Danger comes from above and around you.

*

Don’t do CPR if there is chest trauma, the person is dead, the person is speaking to you, if a body is rotting, if a heart is outside the body, if a head is not attached to the body, if the scene is unsafe.

*

You won’t know when your judgment fails you.

*

In the documentary “A Dozen More Turns,” a group of Alaskan grad school skiers gets caught in an avalanche on Mt. Nemesis. One of them snaps his leg and another dies.

“They should have known better,” an urban EMT in the WFR course says.

Would we have known any better?

*

The best container for water is your body.

*

Lightning spreads like a stream. The electrical charge flows along the ground gathering ions and then bolts up into the clouds. The safest place to be in a field, during a thunderstorm, is not down, but on a buoy of earth.

*

We have killed so many rattlesnakes that rattlesnakes now self-select to not grow rattles.

*

Six “Sand Dabs” are spread throughout three of Oliver’s books: Winter Hours, Blue Pastures, and West Wind. The sand dab is a small, bony, significant but well-put-together fish.

“I would speak here of the darkness of the world, and the light of _____. But I don’t know what to call it. Maybe hope.”

-from Winter Hours by Mary Oliver

Winter Hours:

What is failure except the lack of achieving a goal? A gulf, chasm, gulch, arroyo, valley—separation of place. You compete but you are defeated. You try but you don’t make it—somewhere. You don’t land. You drift. You carry the fault that didn’t enable you to succeed. You are the cause of your own let down.

What is mercy except underserved leniency, relief, and release?

*

Because the sessions began at 8:30AM I woke in darkness to journal my WFR training experience and to jot down the curious and inspiring bits of Winter Hours.

The ground-level studio was warm, almost damp since I ran a space heater all night long. The coils glowed as orange as coals and a fan spun, blowing beneath the bed and rising up to me tucked under a comforter. Double doors lead into the one room with a kitchenette and bathroom stall. The studio fit snug under the deck of a social worker’s house. She rented out the space cheaper than a hotel room.

I woke alone in the navy room. The walls were painted light blue and the trim and floorboard and doors were painted a darker blue, but it all looked nearly black like a bruise until I turned on a light.

I worked at a table quadranted off with four stools that tucked underneath, by the legs. Rarely did I experience being alone in the quiet. I did, and didn’t, like it. I liked turning over my thoughts without distraction, except for the distraction that there wasn’t any distraction—that there wasn’t my cat or Lauren or anybody I really knew in the entire state.

I have known loneliness even with being with someone. Or perhaps not loneliness, but despair.

After my journaling and a cup of coffee and a bowl of cereal, I suited up in wool socks, long underwear, a turtleneck, synthetic T-shirt, Carhartt pants, a fleece pull-over, an insulated canvas jacket, a scarf, hat with ear flaps, mittens, and waterproof ankle boots. I felt in uniform—that I had a purpose, a duty, to save lives; myself included.

The winter morning air crackled and I steamed, walking up the frosty hill to my car parked at a lesser angle. I turned over the ignition, warming up the oil and the engine. Exhaust plumed from the tailpipe, escaping into the brightening sky.

*

I had pulled up and shut our garage door. I didn’t like the work I did even though it more than paid the bills. I drove a bus at odd hours of the day, on-calls, and Saturday nights since I was ranked 101 out of 120 drivers. I would sit all day and pay close attention to the road around town and the mall and the university and downtown and everywhere else in between. It wasn’t mindless, it was mindful; exhausting.

Ironically, I had to drive the direct 5 minutes to and from work because I couldn’t regularly catch the bus in time before my shifts. I would have had to ride for 20 minutes and then wait at least another 10 minutes adding an unpaid extra hour to each day.

I felt strapped into my position. I couldn’t just quit. What would I do in Ames that would pay as much? How would I afford to live? How could I go on riding the wheel and feeling unchallenged, but also depleted?

My vision clouded. I switched the fog lights on. Their orange beams cast caution in the filling garage.

I thought about staying. Lauren and I had had a confrontation. I don’t know what to call it. A non-physical fight? An empty debate? An emotional conversation?

We had been married for less than one year. Winter’s coldness still froze the nights of early spring and the tulip bulbs hadn’t sprouted. She didn’t know. I didn’t know. The commitment felt like too much, something we weren’t prepared for. Would this—the unrest, the doubt, the nausea—ever end?

The intoxicating exhaust settled in. It was a thicker smell than the sweetness at the gas pump. Should I get out? I thought about driving off, to not even consider the next thing with work, with Lauren, with my life. It would be even easier to just let the engine run motionless in the garage and floor the pedal so the carburetor would open for gas to flow and burn and take me away.

I turned the key and took it out. I huffed out a toxic breath and opened the car door and waded through the gray haze. I exited all that.

*

I have never planned to live in the west. I’d been to Colorado as a youth. Once, Lauren and I had visited friends in New Mexico for Albuquerque’s hot air balloon festival. Then, we had honeymooned in Portland, Oregon for a food festival, but spent most of our time at Powell’s Books. We came to know the upper Midwest almost as well as the East Coast and the South where we thought we would return.

I have not forgotten how it feels to be a stranger in a strange land. I still felt strange even after living five years in Iowa. I came to enjoy the corn and casseroles as much as the sand and sweet tea of Florida. I could spot a bur oak better than a magnolia, but I never saw prairie rose while my parents’ neighborhood had multiple orange trees, their blossoms zesting with the acidic hint of future citrus. I loved spotting an Eastern goldfinch darting in a flash above hostas while I detested the hidden repeating and annoying mockingbird mimicking a car alarm from a scrub pine.

I love to figure out the layout of a town, where the roads, trails, stores, houses, and restaurants unfortunately cut down the trees and plants and land. I like the sense of structure, or order, while also wanting those green spaces to wildly push up through the concrete and plywood and rebar. I go to all of the same places a few times to find out what they have and at what cost and how they serve or neglect people. I decide between one or two places and then continue going there. I settle.

*

From one of the three needs—dwelling—came work in Iowa, occasionally by willingness, or skill. One morning I shoveled dirt from a truck bed into a wheelbarrow and rolled the loads to the backyard of a retired special ed teacher. When I dumped the load, my forearms strained and flexed and released with the tip of dense soil.

I worked with a guy I knew. Work always came from some guy, some project, for some person’s home. Where they already lived. I had cut out windows and sealed flashing under new ones; scraped off paint from Craftsman roofs’ peaks and shellacked on fresh coats; and yanked out pink insulation from rim joists in basements—that would be replaced with sawed foam board, its blue staticky minuscule debris clinging to my jeans—the fiberglass speckled my skin but only cleared in a cold shower so my heated skin’s pores wouldn’t relax and open and accept the shards.

I raked the loads of dirt along a rectangle of 2x4s that would become a cement patio. The rectangle that contained the slurry of concrete was called “the form.” Not a frame, because a frame held a wall before sheets of plywood and then drywall were hammered and hung in place. I loved the language of construction, how the words worked.

Inside the form we crosshatched rebar to support the slurry so the soon-to-seal cement wouldn’t crack. Cement traps water. In basements cement will moisten, feel damp, and then sweat.

We walk on water every day. This is no blind path of faith. This is the road of work.

*

For years, in the afternoons, I walked down Clark Avenue. Down as in south. Down as in the slope of Ames toward downtown. Down as in whatever to call the spiral and drain and loss of purpose.

On the east sidewalk I treaded hundreds of times. For several seasons I walked to get the sun, even though my home office had a south-facing reading chair. I would follow the shine before the rays filtered through the tree line and then dipped behind the tree line and well before the sun slipped off the edge of the Midwest. Walking out the door was the most difficult step; to go without a need to get anywhere else, but away. I was getting away from loneliness, from a distancing muteness close to neglect. Sometimes in winters between odd jobs and indoor work I wouldn’t talk to anyone except for Lauren the whole gray day.

I didn’t know I would encounter people on my walks, but I did. These were neighbors without names. I guessed they had come to town for the university, or perhaps the railroad. Most likely to get away from farming. They retired and got old and then they were there in their front windows or lawns or gardens. The sweatpantsed man standing on his couch who I wondered if he was tantruming over the cable news or screwing in an overhead light bulb. The lady who shuffled down her driveway to shout, “Stop!” at the rampant Solomon’s seal. The deaf woman who smiled when I gestured at her lilies. The stay-at-home dad raking leaves into piles or shoveling snow or mowing the lawn or seeding the lawn and then giving me the manly nod and, depending on the season, the brim-of-hat tap.

*

The seasons change. Now an ice storm threatens the end of the WFR weeklong course since the University of Missouri will close the next day. So, tonight, this Thursday, we test out. Answering a multiple-choice test and then splint a leg with a book, pad, jacket, and p-chord. I use Southwestern Homelands, my North Face, a classroom pad, and borrowed rope. I’m in the odd group, the only pair with a plus one. The geography master’s student researching digital terrorism and the undergrad athletic trainer. I forget to include a trucker’s knot in my simple loop and so my half-hitches come loose from femur to shin and the instructor doesn’t like that we’re last. At last, I re-do the entire splint and then we lose the personal trainer to another pair for the final assessment of clearing a spine after a positive mechanism of injury (read: someone fell from a height).

Of course, I support the geography student’s neck and I know where to look for any bruising behind his ears and how to dab his earlobe to check for any cranial fluid leaking and palpate his back and test the feeling in his palm and pinch his fingerpads for capillary refill and take his pulse and cover his eyes to see if the pupils equally and reactively respond to light and create a c-brace with his fleece jacket and ask him his name, where he is, and what month it is. Pain is the answer I don’t want to receive from any question; I ask as he moves his head on his neck left then right and then up and finally down like the cardinal directions, east and west, and north and south. Finally, Dan, at Mizzou, during January, is cleared.

There is a place on the road home where my eyes droop while listening to the Black-Eyed Blonde on CD. I roll the windows down when the exhumed Philip Marlowe isn’t enough to keep me awake. How the chill snaps my eyes fully open! I stagger the stops I make for coffee so I don’t crash with the lack of caffeine or the jittery blur of happiness, returning to Lauren.

During the WFR course, Lauren and I texted and talked to continue to dwell together even as we were apart and were readying to leave. Overnight, I drive to our garage, to our place, to our door that we continue to open for each other.

*

Darkness is the best time to write. I mean my emotional and woken and environmental state. Perhaps something wrong or just rising or shadowed, the thing that needs lightening, lightning, light, is what I like to work with.

In the act of writing an essay, I am loyal, and wandering. As much as I can I neglect the rest of the day—hunger, work, communication—and attempt to submerge in my mind both memory and how I recall. I think, What do I know? What I consider is a tangle to undo and then weave into something useable. Oliver writes of hearing a song, a whisper, a voice. I am no Oliver yet, but I know of that language inside myself. Every essayist attempts to listen to it. You can learn the rules for the dance, but not the feel. You can hope for talent, but not style. Hope for ability. It is real and spiritual. It is a possession, and ephemeral. Perhaps it’s why I jot on scrapes of paper and then scribble them together on lined notebooks. My laptop only helps me get the supplies in order, ready to construct.

*

I could not be an essayist without work. Someone else could. But not me. For me, the experiences pile up. During a driving shift, in a garden plot, or on a ladder I work toward a physical exhaustion that fills a mental reserve—a tap to pour out with writing. I learn, and then write, how doing something affects me.

Perhaps I’m a working writer. But there’s always a tension between needing to work and wanting to write but not wanting to write for work. I also don’t want to be a communist or union organizer or whatever would be a writer writing for workers. I document my own labor: pay, hours, and skill and treatment and interpersonal relationships and lack of lunch breaks. What I write begins with the shifts and doesn’t end after work. Maybe I would become an activist if I got comfortable. But I haven’t. I don’t consider the gross domestic product, international trade agreements, or inflation rates. I am just going to work and riding the wheel, digging with a trowel, slinging a brush and then coming home with an experience. This is an unfortunately usual way to live—non-mystical, scraping by.

The world makes a distinction between work: digging ditches or going to meetings. There is a false divide between the same sort of taxing menial, repetitive tasks. You strain your back or you widen your ass. What’s the difference between physical and mental jobs? Education, opportunity, nepotism? There are carpenters torquing nails out of siding who spend nights reading Cormac McCarthy. There are English professors writing mysteries who cut cedars with a chainsaw. There are research scientists advocating for rye as cover crop who fill their freezers with hunted waterfowl. There are bakers punching down swollen sourdough who practice transcendental meditation. There are vegetable farmers spot weeding brussel sprouts who attend racial equality town halls. The world is made up of fiber optic cables, ballpoint pens, and screws. A diesel is alive. The screen of the phone and the screen inset on a hinged door that lets in the flow, but not the bugs, is circulatory. There is breath in all work.

What I want to emanate in my essays is the feeling—both physical and emotional—of knowing the job, the trajectory toward mastery that occurs on a no set-up turn, the pluck of a taproot, or the slide of a primer coat.

There is something special in this, I believe. It creates something. Writing work is a way of clocking-in with a subject. You become what it is. With your muscle—brain or brawn—you live as you work. The muse is the planned, the effortful, the constructed—not the flighty, the sporadic. You work, and you notice. You are purposeful in order to be fulfilled. You consider how to do a job by doing it, and then telling it. Each evening, you come home and your beloved says—always—How was work? The answer comes as a narrative reconstructed.

*

Lauren and I met when we were in our early twenties. For myself it was so adult—a shared bed and split bills. Coupling. We have lived together for a half-dozen years, without an end. I have told lots about it. Confession, the over-share in our selfish world, has been a catharsis of youth. We are forgiven, and we try again. We are both yoked, and maturing, together. Repeat: we are forgiven, and we try again. We work with sincerity, goofiness, kindness, and forgiveness. Whenever I write something angry it lacks my life with Lauren. Whenever I write something hopeful it is my heart yearning to live it with Lauren. This is my life’s work.

That's How It Is With Me: A Review of Notes from My Phone*

It’s tempting to write off Notes From My Phone* as a gimmicky attempt at memoir without fully plunging into the self-indulgence of writing about oneself. The contents of this book started as notes that Michelle Junot left to herself on her phone. At the urging of Mason Jar Press, they were shaped into a collection of memoir fragments that construct a twentysomething woman’s quarter-life crisis, among other things.

Even that is tempting to write off. Who cares about a twentysomething woman’s quarter-life crisis, you might ask. All of our favorite celebrities are dying and Donald Trump is filling the government with Nazis. Enough with this Thought Catalog “elegy for my twenties” bullshit, the past few months have taken too much from us.

I’m getting really specific here because I had those thoughts when I started this book, and I’m glad I ignored them. As it turns out, Notes From My Phone* is quietly profound.

For one thing, it’s not all lists and reminders to buy contact solution. Themes do emerge from repetition; heartbreak, self-doubt, rejection, attempts to regain confidence as a response to heartbreak, and a mouse in Michelle’s apartment whose appearances get funnier as Michelle gets more exasperated. As someone who once found a mouse sleeping in his damn bed a few apartments ago, she won my sympathies.

“The power just went out. How is this my life?” Michelle wonders at one point during the mouse’s unwelcome tenancy in her apartment. “I’m in the dark with a mouse who may be agitated by the smell of peppermint.”

Earlier, she’d been ruminating on whether it was better to be aware of the mouse’s presence, or ignorant of it. “I am not one for confrontation,” she writes. “I do not like speaking about hard things or the lump that forms in my throat when tears find my eyes. I don’t like the way that men’s faces change when my eyes tear.”

Later, she writes that the mouse “taught me how I deal with fear: I let it consume me. I let the what-ifs rule who I am. I err on the side of seizing a false sense of control over my life.” By this point, the mouse’s original, comedic role in this book has shifted into a mechanism for introspection.

Religion has a similar function in Notes From My Phone*. Michelle is a Christian, and a lot of talking to God happens in this book. In a way, that’s kind of a bold move, to announce one’s religious beliefs beyond the context of ultimately rejecting them, or as part of a grander redemptive arc.

“Lord, I’m tired, and I’m awake again,” she writes, complaining of insomnia. “I want to take comfort in you, rest in the fact that you have a plan for me. Rest in your grace and deep love for me. Rest in the fact that those feelings and desires and misunderstood heartache will go away soon. But how will it go away if I don’t let go of it?”

“I just wish I understood what was of you and what wasn’t,” she says later, while grieving the end of a relationship. “I’m scared of your comfort, and I’m scared what following you might actually mean,” she says in a prayer, of sorts. “How do I learn to trust you when my own heart gets in the way?”

Clearly, Michelle’s relationship with God is complex and frustrated. When she prays for advice about how to move on from a dissolved relationship, or what it means to be an adult when the hallmarks of adulthood (career, house, kids) seem impossible to reach, one wonders if she’s using prayer as a vessel for talking to herself.

Michelle wonders that herself sometimes. “I like to think I put my trust in God,” she says, “but really, I’m functionally trusting myself/and then I screw up/and then I’m shocked by it/because I have this unrealistic view of my own heart.”

The frank, confessional tone of passages like those — and the book’s sparse interior layout — makes the reader feel almost voyeuristic by the end. It’s like finding your outwardly stable older sister’s journal and discovering her hidden frailties; this book genuinely doesn’t read like something that was meant for other people to see. In that sense, it’s unlike any memoir I’ve ever read before. Both in structure and execution, Notes From My Phone* resists the urge to show off, and therein lies its strength.

This Ark’s Not Going Down—Or Is It?

Imagine that it’s 2020, and you’re under the dim lights of your cozy multiplex with a bucket of the best butter-slathered popcorn that money can buy. It’s the premiere of Wes Anderson’s latest colorfully stylized masterpiece in comic absurdity. You’ve been watching carefully, and it’s already maybe scene ten, and amidst all the beautiful frames, you keep seeing a book in the background that is absolutely stunning. Anderson’s giving some major praise. The book’s cover is pink and baby blue. Maybe there are some Manhattan buildings in the background—yeah, that’s what it is. It has a thick, brush-like font written in white, bold letters. I’ll go ahead and tell you: the book is Julian Tepper’s Ark, and it, in all of its quirky eccentricities, is downright brilliant.

Set in the aforementioned city of Manhattan, Tepper’s sophomore novel, Ark, follows three generations of the Arkin family who have mostly lost at life. Ben is the (extremely) wealthy patriarch, and he’s a helpless and hilarious mess. His children—Sondra, Doris, and Oliver—run a record label, and they’ve never had any success. Ben has rescued them on countless occasions from shutting down. Tepper tells us that Ben “put at least two million into Shout!” The reason he gave them the money wasn’t that he actually believed in the business; no, it was because it was a way “just to keep the kids busy.”

Ben’s a lot of things, but mostly he identifies as a self-proclaimed artist. Tepper writes of Ben, “His art supplies alone were seven to eight thousand a month.” There’s a big problem with his expenses: he’s never sold any of his work.

For most artists not selling anything—literally nothing in a lifetime—would be emotionally defeating, but that’s not the case for Ben. He, with the help of his assistant Jerome, likes to create for the sake of creating: “You see this? These paintings? These sculptures? They are perfectly meaningless things. And yet in making them, I have felt what it feels like to be a king. And that stimulus to my brain, that knowledge of creation which I have gained… that, Jerome, is what all this making is about.”

Tepper never misses a beat throughout Ark. The pacing is quick, and the dialogue snaps. The fictional setting in which Tepper plants us feels as vibrant and alive as the New York that I know and love.

Where Tepper’s at his very best is in the novel’s early scenes with Ben, when the artist is at work. Tepper gives us a glimpse at how Ben creates:

He filled a pot with water and placed it on the stovetop. Once the water was boiling, he dropped the chicken carcass, as well as the bones that had been on his plate, into the pot. For just over eight minutes he stared into the pot, thinking. Then, he drained the water, cleaned the remaining meat off the bones and brought them into the studio, found a shallow wood box one foot wide by one foot long, took some short nails and a hammer from a drawer, and put everything on his desk, and began arranging the bones inside the box. The legs were along the edges, the breastbone was placed centrally, the wings stuck out from beneath the breastbone. He hammered the nails through the bones into the wood. After which he went into a back closet and found a bag of sand, and poured it over the bones until they were halfway submerged. Then he had Jerome cut a piece of glass, which the artist glued to the box, closing the bones and sand.

The description is almost breathtaking, both in the scope of artistry and in the level of strangeness in which Ben exists. The odd patriarch could come off as being aloof and unlikeable in other hands, but Tepper gives him a genuine, dynamic dimensionality that transcends any kind of flatness.

As Ark progresses, there’s more to savor. Rebecca, Oliver’s daughter and also the only ‘successful’ member of the Arkin family, enters the picture after a lawsuit involving the family’s record label. She struggles to understand her family, and she doubts that she ever will. Rebecca is a strong character and helps to ground the novel in its more far-reaching moments.

Tepper’s novel is about art, for sure, but it’s also about the bonds that tie families together. How deep can blood really run? And, even more importantly, how deep should it run?

Ark has it all. There is heartbreak: we wind up at a cemetery. There is laughter: we encounter a fight at the cemetery. There’s also a sense of hope. By Ark’s end, the Arkin family has endured about as much as any family could take. Still, however, they remain a family. They are the Arkins. They’ve always made it, and there’s no reason to give up on them now.

Women in the Study Reported Feeling Pain

Sometimes, when I’m having trouble expressing myself, I wish that I could somehow give people access to my brain, so that they could experience what it’s like in there for a while. I consider how my mind would work as a piece of art or literature. I repeat the phrase publish my brain to myself. With The Second Body, Claire Donato has succeeded in publishing hers. By opening this book you are submerging yourself in a mind. Thoughts and ideas flood in through your ears and nose. Words bully their way through your pores. Your entire being becomes saturated. You are at once inside of the book/mind and it is inside of you. While you explore its passages and personality, it is probing you at the same time. I had the disconcerting feeling that the book was creating a mold of my own mind, studying it and making adjustments.

In her blurb of the book, Kate Durbin asks, “What is The Second Body?” This is a valid question. While this collection is full of bodies, they are rarely identified. The focus is not on their external features but the experience of being inside them. There in no joy to that experience in these poems. Just as pain is one of the inherent features of having a body, pain is a feature of this book. Durbin’s question is answered in the title poem, where Donato writes, “We can expect painful experiences (the first body)./ The second body is the suffering.” This suffering takes a range of forms, from the everyday (“Later, at home, a translucent blister”), to the more unexpected (“Antlers germinate like lumps and extend outward from my mind”), but it is all female suffering.

It seems clear that The Second Body is the female body. The title a reference to Eve being created after Adam, the literal second body, or an echo of The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir. But, as should be expected, the title refers inward as well: there is plenty of doubling and mirroring happening here. Throughout the collection, the speaker refers to “My friend Claire”, suggesting that this voice doesn’t belong to Claire Donato but to some second, unknown body. And bodies aren’t the only things that are twinned. In the poem “The Second Body Is a Shield”, Donato writes, “Imagine a pure gold ring. Divide it in half, then keep/ Dividing and dividing and dividing.” This type of multiplication by division appears throughout the book, but another example comes from this same poem: “Now she carries a dense/ Second body in her brain, a second body not unlike/ The first”. The woman herself is divided in two. So perhaps The Second Body isn’t simply the female body but the imagined female body, which in itself has been the cause of plenty of pain.

Although The Second Body focuses on pain, that is not its only preoccupation. This is a book of obsessions. In addition to bodies and pain, it is also full of time, language, architecture, the environment. Donato is even preoccupied by obsession itself as she writes about cataloguing and exhibition. But everything always returns to the body. These other things can only be experienced through the mediation of a body. And so boys become horses and women mutate into light and tables. Death is ever present in the collection, from the epigraphs at the front of the book to “Manifesto La Terre / Mori”, the title of the final poem. But while death may be the end of a person, it is not the end of a body, so the book continues forward as the corpses fall behind it.

No matter which of her obsessions she is focusing in on, Donato treats her subject with a light, deft hand. One note I made while reading was: “Assured voice. Masterful. Unexpected turns.” Whereas I often have trouble expressing myself, with these poems Donato shows no such difficulty. She is always in complete control, not only an expert on whichever subject she is addressing at any given time but also approaching it in the perfect way, whether that is scientific jargon or humorous line breaks, eight words scattered across a page or lines so long they must be printed landscape. The emergence of a writer with such command of both form and content is rare and it should be celebrated when it does occur. Having mastered both body and mind, I have no idea what Donato will do next, but I’m excited to find out.

A Conversation with Bonnie Jo Campbell and Andrea Scarpino

One might make the argument that two of the strongest voices in contemporary Michigan are Andrea Scarpino, representing the Upper Peninsula poetry scene, and Bonnie Jo Campbell, representing the Lower Peninsula fiction scene. The strength of their voices comes from a combination of having unique, distinctive, and passionate style and subject matter on the page, furthered by both authors willingness to tour extensively, notably to rural communities in the state. Scarpino is the 2015-2017 U.P. Poet Laureate whose latest book is What the Willow Said as It Fell (Red Hen Press). Bonnie Jo Campbell is a previous National Book Award finalist whose current book is Mothers, Tell Your Daughters: Stories (W.W. Norton & Company).

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RR: Both of you are brilliant with titles. I’m a big fan of the cryptic Once, Then and the best title of 2015 might be Mothers, Tell Your Daughters: Stories with its lovely double-entendre of “Mothers, tell your daughters stories.” Can you talk about your book titles?

AS: Thank you, Ron! Your compliment means a lot to me because I really struggle with titles. When I was doing my MFA, one of the recurring criticisms of my workshop submissions was that I needed a different title, and I often go through dozens before I find one I really like. They just seem so final—like naming a child.

I really like titles that simultaneously shape the reader’s expectations and withhold a little bit of information from the reader. I want the reader to be interested in opening my book, but I also don’t want to be too explicit about the book’s content. In both my poetry collections, the titles developed from lines within the book itself which I hope readers will recognize when they’re reading. In my second book, the line, “what the willow said as it fell” is followed by, “Take this body, make it whole.” So I liked What the Willow Said as It Fell as a title in part because I’m hoping the idea of wholeness, and obviously the fact of the body, shines through the poetry.

BJC: Thank you, indeed, Ron! I’m with Andrea that titles are hard. And I might even go so far as to say that a work is not finished until it has the right title on it, and for me the title is often the last element of the story or collection to come to me. That said, after I get the right title, by settling into the final understanding of my work, then I have still more work to do, adjusting the whole work slightly to the title. The titles to all three of my collections have great stories behind them, and I’ll say that I spent months coming up with Mothers, Tell Your Daughters. I had this story collection, but didn’t quite know what it was about. After trying out hundreds of other titles, arguing with my editor and agent, and stressing endlessly, I finally came upon this one. It resonates especially for me because it’s a line from the song “House of the Rising Sun” when sung by certain female artists. Once alighting on that title, my editor and I made some adjustments to the collection, leaving out a few stories that no longer fit and requiring me to write two new stories, including the title story. American Salvage has a similar story behind it, in that the title story was the last one I wrote. My novel, Once Upon a River, has a different story behind it.  My agent came up with that title in the shower. We sold the book with that title, and I didn’t like it for a long while. Finally, when I saw the title allowed me to be fantastical, I embraced it, and I still like it.

RR: You both write about suffering frequently. What role does suffering play in your fiction and poetry? Do you handle it as redemptive or existential?

AS: I don’t think there is anything redemptive in suffering. It’s just suffering: it just hurts. I actually respond very negatively to suggestions that suffering makes us better people or enriches our lives in some deep way. I know some people derive meaning from their suffering and I’m glad for them when that’s the case, but the only meaning I’ve been able to derive from painful moments in my life is this sucks. I want this to end.

Suffering is an integral part of being alive and being human, which is why I so often write about it—I don’t think a single human being is spared suffering. And yet, we so often like to pretend we don’t suffer. We’re told to put on a brave face, and women especially are told we should smile no matter what is happening in our personal lives. So I think it’s incredibly important to acknowledge and sit with suffering, to understand it as a central human experience, and to appreciate the suffering of others around us. And writing and reading about suffering can help us with that.

BJC: I tend to write about what worries me, and the suffering of others worries me immensely. We fiction writers tend to write about suffering that comes about both because of circumstances and also because of the nature of one’s character—it is most interesting when a character has at least partially brought about his or her own suffering. I don’t write as a sociologist, and my main interest is in exploring the human character, but I am glad when my readers tell me that they have more sympathy for the sorts of folks they encounter in life because of my stories. Like Andrea, I see suffering as universal. Nobody’s life is easy when you come down to it—we want to pretend some people swim effortlessly through life’s waters, but life is hard for everybody a good portion of the time. And while I don’t see suffering as inherently redemptive, I do think it can sometimes spur a character into action.

RR: What religion do you identify with? What’s your religious/spiritual background?

AS: I don’t identify with any religion in all honesty. My father was Catholic so I have spent a fair amount of time in the Catholic Church, and my mother identified as Quaker for a while, so I spent time at Friends Meetings. I also grew up with dear friends who were Jewish and Muslim, and as an adult, I’ve read some about Buddhism. So I guess I have a bit of a smorgasbord religious background, which also means I don’t have a deep understanding of any one tradition.

BJC: Andrea, you and I need to have a beer! How have we never sat down together?

RR: The following is quoted from Mothers, Tell Your Daughters:

“I’m not going to hell,” he whispered.  “God is leading me home.  He has shone his light on the path to Him.  God has forgiven me.”

“For what, Carl?  What has God forgiven you for?”

“Forsaking Jesus.”  He sounded exhausted, his voice a hiss.

“What else?”

There was a long pause before he whispered, “Jesus is my Lord and Savior, my light in the darkness.”

“How about forgiveness for hitting your wife?  And your son?  Is God forgiving you for that?”

Could you talk about this passage?

BJC:  The passage is from the story, “A Multitude of Sins,” a man who has abused his wife and son finds Jesus right at the end and so figures he’s saved. When the husband is dying of cancer, the wife begins to discover the seeds of her empowerment. She finds herself furious at the notion of her husband receiving forgiveness. I enjoy seeing this woman become angry after a life of submissiveness.

RR: Andrea, in your poem “Homily,” you repeat the phrase, “She didn’t believe in God.” Why that repetition?

AS: My poem “Homily” was based on an experience I had while visiting Paris and walking into Notre Dame on Christmas Day: the priest was saying the mass in Latin, and the air was filled with incense and evergreen, and I was completely in love with being there and being present in the moment even though I don’t identify as Catholic. So I guess I tried to capture the feeling of wanting so badly to believe in something because the present moment is so special, but also knowing, deep down, that belief is just not there.

RR: Do you find you struggle with your religious beliefs through your characters?

AS: I don’t know if I struggle with my own religious belief through my poetry, but I definitely am a person who questions almost everything, including religious belief, in my life and in my poetry. I like feeling open to the world, and I like questioning, and I like hearing about other people’s beliefs, and I like learning how other people experience the world around them. And I find religious belief endlessly curious and interesting and rich with possibility.

BJC:  I’m not interested in my own religiosity, but I am interested in the religious beliefs of others, and as a writer, I’m interested in seeing how those beliefs inform character.

RR: Bonnie Jo, Halloween appears in Once Upon a River and Q Road, notably in the passage on “Halloween [where], he’d soaped windows, strung toilet paper across people’s front yards, and once he’d found a veined, milky afterbirth from his sister’s horse foaling, and in the middle of the night dragged it onto a neighbor’s front porch.”

Are you attracted to what an old Religion professor of mine, Dr. Hough, called the Jungian shadow aspects of humanity?

BJC: Katherine Dunn’s novel Geek Love has an epigraph from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a line Prospero says of the monster Caliban: “This thing of darkness I Acknowledge mine.”  I, too, acknowledge mine!

RR: Earlier, we spoke of suffering.  Both of you are connected to metaphorical center points in Michigan—Marquette and Grand Rapids. Grand Rapids/Kalamazoo is emerging as an economic and spiritual powerhouse of the state, as well as important for Michigan publishing with Zondervan and New Issues Press. There is also the complication of poverty in the far southwest regions that grinds up against Grand Rapids’ wealth. Hate groups are in that area and the recent Uber driver murders. Bonnie Jo, where you live is a very complicated place. Can you talk about good and evil in your writing, how it fits with the complexities of southwest Michigan?

BJC:  I was just reading Plainsong by Kent Haruf, and I was noticing how he makes very clear who is good and who is evil in his stories. I am more interested in gray areas of human nature, in people who try to be good, but fail, and in people who make trouble sometimes. The person who has a decent job and a good family situation might go his or her whole life as a productive law-abiding citizen, while the same person, after losing a job and a spouse and children might become a meth-addicted criminal. What amazed me about the Uber shooter is just how ordinary and normal he was; that showed me that crimes are not committed by devils or evil people necessarily. Crimes are committed by people who make bad choices, and they make them for a variety of reasons, some of which we will never understand.

All we can do, it seems to me, is pay attention, keep our minds open to all the possibilities good and bad, and work to care for one another at all times. We can strive to never be cruel or judgmental.

RR: Who are the great spiritual writers in fiction and poetry?

AS: I love Marilynn Robinson’s writing, particularly Gilead. I first listened to that book as an audiobook on a road trip many years ago, and I remember just weeping while I was driving because I was so moved by the quiet spirituality throughout her writing. And that quietness is really the kind of spiritual or religious writing that I most appreciate: a quiet attention to those around us, a quiet attention to the world, a quiet attention to the connections that make us human.

RR: What issues of religion do writers need to talk about now?

AS: Acceptance and appreciation of different opinions, viewpoints, and religious traditions. Our country’s hate speech deeply troubles me, particularly as it is directed toward Muslims. But we’ve never been particularly good at accepting differing viewpoints and that’s something that writers and religious leaders and teachers and parents and politicians all need to address.

BJC: As a writer I spend a lot of time imagining how it feels to be in someone else’s shoes, and that helps me be more humble and generous toward my fellow human beings, even the difficult ones.

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Interviewer Ron Riekki’s latest book is the 2016 Independent Publisher Book Award-winning Here: Women Writing on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (Michigan State University Press), which includes writing from Bonnie Jo Campbell and Andrea Scarpino.

An Interview with Chris Wiewiora

I first met Chris Wiewiora in 2008 when he was still an undergraduate student at the University of Central Florida. I was the managing editor at The Florida Review. Chris came on as our assistant editor on work-study and quickly proved that he was one of our hardest working staff members. His work ethic and editorial chops were one thing, but soon I got to see some of his stellar early writing and we started exchanging comments on each other’s fiction and non-fiction essays.

In the years since, we’ve grown in different directions. I’ve gone on to pursue a career in information security, and Chris has ventured onward bravely to see his non-fiction anthologized in Best Food Writing and The Norton Reader, and non-fiction essays about things like marriage, bus driving, killer whales, good pizza, and the water supply published in all sorts of excellent places.

So it’s a pleasure to get the opportunity to revisit this interview I did with Chris regarding “Riding Solo,” one of my favorite essays that I’ve had the opportunity to help Chris work on.

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EB: “Riding Solo,” your essay just published by Thought Catalog, brings together a lot of disparate themes: motorcycle riding, recovering from an injury, a failed relationship, pornography, casual sex encounters. How did you start writing it?

CW: There was an epigraph from another creative piece I was using as a diving board, a jumping off point, about motorcycling. The epigraph was from “Novorapid” by Tyler Enfield, from The Florida Review issue with the underwater woman’s face on the cover.

“… death is sexy when you are twenty-one, when you are invincible, when your skin is electric with the glory of youth and you are clueless, vital, assured.”

I have a folder an inch thick of all the drafts. I outlined the essay too, which was weird, because I don’t think I had done that before. Originally this started as a story, I think it was first called “Riding Solo,” and then it changed to “Now,” and finally it went back to “Riding Solo.” It was first written as a mid-length essay that primarily had to do with the relationship and motorcycling. Then it brought in more of the casual encounter and the pornography and those different worlds. And as those sub-worlds expanded the narrative world, that made the essay longer. At one point it was nine thousand, ten thousand words. Then at one point I cut it down to fifteen hundred words, when it was just about monikers of casual encounters. At another point I cut out all the Kisha stuff, all the motorcycling stuff, which was very weird. So it’s gone through a lot.

EB: You described stories to me as pearls before, where there’s a grit at the center. What do you mean by that?

CW: The grit is the little piece of sand that an oyster creates this nacre around, and that’s called mother-of-pearl, and it hardens. I’ve thought of that as the origin story of essays. There’s always a little piece that rubs against you, like a pebble in your shoe, and then you’re creating this protective layer, and out of that comes this pearl.

EB: So after you had said that to me so long ago I went and read about pearls.

CW: Oh, am I way off?

EB: No, no. The story we tell, of course, is that they are grits of sand that turn into a beautiful pearl. But I read that it’s most often a harmful parasite, or an infection, and the oyster creates the pearl to quarantine itself against it. It’s an immune system response.

CW: I like hearing that it’s not sand, that it’s a parasite the oyster makes a pearl around. The best writing that I’ve written is when I feel uncomfortable. I’m getting at those things that need to be discussed.

It’s uncomfortable and it takes work, but it’s necessary because at the core of it there is this thing fucking feeding off of me. And I think that’s many times what essaying is about. It’s cathartic, like recovery.

EB: So what was the thing at the center of this essay that set it off?

CW: Well, the story isn’t the traditional inverted checkmark of rising action, climax, resolution. It’s this mirrored, opposite checkmark. More like a plummet. Everything gone bad: My relationship with my girlfriend Kisha, gone bad. Addiction, gone bad. Using people, gone bad. Motorcycling, gone bad. The despair of this empty situation, everything is being destroyed and then just at the end it’s maybe redlining, topping out on the motorcycle. No recovery, it’s just survival.

I remember driving with my buddy DJ a few months before I wrote this essay. I think it was when Kisha and I were sleeping together, fucking each other. DJ and I were stuck in traffic, and he said, “Sometimes I can’t wait for a relationship to be over so I can write about it.”

And it was just such a fucked-up thing, where you can steer your life to be able to make that into a story that later on you’re going to write about. For him, it was fiction. For me, I was a nonfiction person, and I could say, “Wow, I could change the way I interact with somebody because later on I could write about it and it would be better.”

So later I asked myself, “Did I end the relationship so I could write a story about it?” And the answer is no. But those are the grits that rubbed me a little wrong.

EB: I remember in an earlier draft we talked about the difference in the diction in the sex scenes, between “sex” and “fucking,” the words themselves.

CW: Yeah. That was an eye opener for me. I think I was just writing whatever, put “breasts” there, put “sex” there, put “fucking” there. And then I realized through the drafting process that the language is defining the action, and this is seeping in. Why not just say what it is? Fucking each other.

The draft changed, then. You know, Kisha and the narrator fucking each other, they’re not having sex. When sex changes to fucking, and “I love you” means “Thanks for doing that.” What’s spoken is not true to the actions in the way that language has to be accurate to portray what’s going on truthfully.

EB: The story begins with the search for a casual sex encounter, one you eventually find with the character Ashley. What was it that pushed you toward seeking out casual sex, and how was it that you came to use Craigslist to search?

CW: Right. There’s a plummet from porn and the relationship to the casual sex. From the beginning there’s an awareness that there’s another world out there. I don’t believe the theory of evangelical groups, like Focus On The Family, when they said that Jeffrey Dahmer had used porn when he was younger or maybe even as an adult and that that had led to tendencies that then led to the murders.

I don’t know if porn leads to behavior. It does affect people, for sure. It’s something that people do when they’re wanting to find something, but it’s not a substitute.

I remember the relationship was over and then being a young American male—it’s very accessible. You can just search “casual encounters” and see the photos and the possible thrill. I thought, being in a college town in a big city, that maybe I could do this activity without anybody knowing and find somebody else, maybe not like me, but in the sense that they want the same thing. It’s inherently wild and dangerous.

The question is when you cross that line: When is it that you transition from looking at the photos to setting up an e-mail account and trying to find somebody? And then when you do find somebody, how do you react?

In the essay there are four responses: There’s “Zorro Couple,” there’s “Barb,” there’s “College Girl” with the black bar over her eyes, and there’s “Ashley.” And then there’s a lot of fake ones and spam. There was even one that I thought was funny, a posting that turned out to be a suicide hotline number. And at the time Craigslist was having trouble with prostitutes. They’d be vague, and you have to call to set up like it was a dentist’s appointment. Instead of your annual teeth cleaning, call for your blowjob. And sometimes I got responses that were women saying how much it costs, and I would say that I’m not going to pay for sex, and they cursed me out, saying I wasn’t going to find sex for free. It’s almost a challenge.

It’s way more difficult for a man to find a woman. Let’s say you do a post, in about a day your post is cemented down by a hundred other posts by other people. So you have to constantly repost. And you want to have a catchy post, you don’t want to be like everybody else. So you’ll look at the others and say, “Okay, everyone’s just putting up a picture of their dick.” It’s like marketing yourself.

One of the eeriest things was, and I didn’t write about this in the essay, I actually saw some guys I knew on the men looking for women list.

EB: Wow.

CW: Yeah. I was like, “Holy crap, I don’t want to put a picture of my face on there.” Still, there is a certain security in place. You’re not going to talk about somebody who’s on it because if you say that, then they know you’re also on it. It’s like, “You don’t talk about Fight Club.” Well…not quite.

EB: You mentioned that when you do something like a casual sex encounter, it’s because you’re looking for something.

CW: You’re looking for something that you think is there and that you can’t get elsewise. There’s a cost to that.

EB: What’s the cost?

CW: The cost is that it’s not real. You’re putting on a mask and you’re protecting yourself. Think about the names, the usernames. You’re not Chris Wiewiora. You’re verbChrisverb. You’re not Ashley. You’re “Black BBW.”

EB: The black boxes over College Girl’s eyes.

CW: Yeah, you’re hiding yourself. Not only are you not showing yourself truly to somebody else, you’re also deconstructing yourself to a certain degree. Breaking yourself down to “I am this: ____.”

EB: Sounds a little like writing nonfiction, doesn’t it?

CW: Right. It’s like, “I am this, this physical characteristic, and that’s it, that’s all I have to offer. That’s all you want. That’s all I’m going to give you in this moment. If I give you more than that, then this moment is not what it’s supposed to be.”

EB: What do you think Ashley was looking for?

CW: You know, there was a certain sweetness, I guess, to the moment. I think everybody wants to be found this way, be accepted, even despite their faults or perceived faults. And what happened was that moment changed from being an encounter, a desire, to being more. Ashley asked if I wanted to make it a regular thing. And I said, “I don’t ever do this more than once.”

I think for her she wanted to find some kind of acceptance of who she was. But that’s not the way to it, that’s not a moment of love.

EB: One of the most striking things about “Riding Solo” is its uncompromising honesty and intimacy. For example, the sections on your relationship to pornography might have been glossed over by a more timid author. What is the impulse behind being so honest with the reader, sharing things that are not so sterile or flattering?

CW: Writing in this kind of shockingly honest way, it’s not confessionalism. Even though I talked about it being cathartic, don’t get me wrong, I don’t have to write this.

I write about these explicit things because it’s what happened. People won’t necessarily be in those situations. Not everybody rides a motorcycle or has an interracial relationship that fails or goes online to find casual sex. So you write it as is, because you want it to be like they were there. Writing is constructed. It’s like a two-dimensional image of a three-dimensional object. I know it’s three-dimensional. And I’m saying, “Hey there’s things creating this image on the wall with fire behind it and there’s shadows, I swear to you it’s three-dimensional.” That’s my contract with the reader. This is the best way that I can tell you how it was and what happened. That’s what I’m doing.

EB: So you’re recently engaged, soon to be married. Has Lauren, your fiancé, read the essay?

CW: She has read this essay as part of a larger collection. And we’ve talked about it, just briefly, to say that this is something wild that I’ve done before, and it doesn’t perturb her that much. It’s just kind of one of those passes you get for being younger.

One of the reasons I wanted to marry Lauren is that I love her for who she is but also that I love that she allows me to be who I am and I don’t have to hide that. She respects me. She’s the first person I’ve been in a relationship with that has read my stuff and is also just fine about being written about. I wouldn’t be. I’d be pissed. I’d be like, “Don’t put me in that, I didn’t say that, I didn’t think that, this isn’t written well.” I’m the worst person to turn the tables on. I’m a pushy editor, and I push back against editing.

EB: “Riding Solo” occupies an interesting place in your overall body of work. This essay is about struggle and so it takes us to some darker places. We get that plummet and then it ends on disconnection. But many of your other works, on The Good Men Project and in literary magazines, show a return to a connected life—stories that talk about love, Lauren, spirituality, and family. How does “Riding Solo” fit into that?

CW: A lot of what I write now is about being younger. It’s not as much about who I am immediately now. I rarely have written about things that have happened in the past two years. This essay “Riding Solo” is from a collection called Toro! which is about failed relationships, masculinity, illness, faith, all things that happened to me when I was younger.

There are other stories in Toro! that are moments of failed or failing relationships where the narrator recognizes the start of that plummet, and that recognition stops him from going down again. It’s a reminder to myself of making it through. It’s a survival story, and that needs to be told. Constantly saving yourself, getting out.

Exuberant and Engaging: Bob Proehl's A Hundred Thousand Worlds

Confession: I can’t get enough mother-son relationship books. I mean it, too. If every text I read contained some kind of mother-son crisis, friendship, or adventure, it wouldn’t get old. These stories are surely not unusual. Some of the most celebrated pieces of literature revolve around mother-son bonds. For example, Emma Donoghue’s Room, John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, and James McBride’s The Color of Water each celebrate motherhood and sonhood in special ways. Part of what makes these types of stories so appealing to me is that they create a rare, globally intersected reading experience. It’s with a glad heart that I announce the latest worthy addition to the mother-son canon: Bob Proehl’s smart and kindhearted A Hundred Thousand Worlds.

Proehl’s novel follows Alex Torrey, a moderately precocious and fully captivating nine-year-old boy, and his comic convention staple of a mother, Valerie, as they travel from the East Coast to Los Angeles with the (unfortunate) goal of meeting up with Alex’s absent father. To say why Val is taking Alex to see his dad would be too much of a spoiler, but it’s safe to point out that the dad isn’t someone you’ll be rooting for.

As A Hundred Thousand Worlds makes its central road trip, there are many comic convention stops along the way, where a host of fun and eccentric characters pop up. There’s an unlucky comic writer, a woman who’s tired of the male-dominated world she tries to inhabit, and illustrators and fans galore. Each adds a nice layer to the larger novel.

The world Proehl creates is exuberant and engaging. It’s impossible to deny that Proehl’s novel is an infectious read.

While A Hundred Thousand Worlds possesses a tonal lightness, there’s also something deeper at work in the novel’s heart. There’s the obvious symbolism of Proehl having his protagonist venture westward. There’s a death. Don’t worry; I’m being metaphorical here. Alex loses his innocence. He grows up. Proehl writes of Alex’s changing mannerisms: “He becomes more adult when she’s not there. His gestures are broader, more sure. He is taller, maybe, or stands up straighter.” Also, Alex wants to go on trips into the nearby cities to buy books and explore with a friend–not his mother. He desires to understand adult complexities. Why can’t all relationships be as simple as he sees them? Why don’t his mother and his father have a relationship?

The most riveting sections, as you might suspect from my opening, are the moments in which Proehl shows the full workings of the mother-son pair. One of the supporting comic-con regulars notes, “It’s a basic rule of nature: you don’t come between a mama bear and her cub.” The love Val shows toward her son makes this statement particularly resonant. Proehl’s prose highlights the intense bond the two have together:

Any time they spent apart was always defined by place and duration. I’m going to the store, I’ll be back in twenty minutes. I’m going downstairs for a drink, I’ll be back in an hour. It seems impossible to think that soon he will not know where she is all the time, and she won’t know where he is, either. His position in space has always been in relation to hers and now, without that, he wonders if he’ll be like a boat on the whole ocean, where you can’t see land in any direction, and the sun cycles over you day after day.

The love Alex has for his mother is just as intense. In one of the book’s best lines, Alex says, “Stories can be true even if they’re not real.” He frequently asks his mother to tell him a story, knowing fully that the truth isn’t always what he gets from her. But what she tells him is what he needs to hear, and he, in turn, finds comfort in her words.

As I was reading, I found myself feeling amazed that the novel is a debut. Proehl’s fine craftsmanship is as evident on the first page as it is on the last one. The dialogue pops; the prose is fresh; the pacing is quick.

Bob Proehl’s A Hundred Thousand Worlds, with its pitch-perfect ending, might just be the best road trip that I’ve taken all summer.