On the Storytelling Trail

We are just back from one week on the road visiting libraries in Miami-Dade and Broward. As always it's a little tiring to be in motion all the time, especially when you have a Walden Pond all your own and do daily meditations in front of it while the herons and eagles fly by or drop in for a chat.

But the beauty of storytelling is that it's one of the best ways we have of touching the smallest members of the tribe. I am thinking of two-year-olds, and on occasion, babies.
Moms are nice too, always in synch with their little ones.

I can't help it: I am all over the place when I tell stories. My face is all over the place. When I see pictures of me telling stories I scare myself.

A little girl raised her hand and said, "Can I ask you a question?"

"Sure."

Then she said, "You have a mustache."

That's the kind of question I like.  There are no non-questions in storytelling. And maybe what my small friend was really saying is, "Why do you have a mustache? What does it do for you? Does it feel funny?"

My father had one, and my grandfathers on both sides of the family tree.

I am not sure having a mustache helps me to tell a story: I'm not sure it doesn't.

I know this -- kids don't have them, unless it's Halloween.

In the parking lot after this storytelling, Lorry found a bright shiny dime. I took two steps beyond her dime and found a new minted quarter. And then -- oh, my gosh! -- I saw a mustache.

Now if you're not surprised by seeing a mustache unattached to a face, I would like to know why.  We stood there staring at it for a few minutes.

I felt my upper lip. "Not mine," I said.

Lorry laughed. "Nor mine," she said.

A Cry of Eagles

Every evening we sit under an oak tree by our quiet pond and do our daily turtle watch. Heads pop up, fish leap, herons stalk -- there is always something to watch, and something to say.

A short distance away in the woods someone is firing a repeating pistol.

Tonight, after the murder of children in Newtown, Connecticut, the pond offers no solace, only stillness. Not one turtle, not one fish jump. But on a nearby tree a couple of eagles cry out in protest. Our national bird crying out against our national rights.

Up the road from us a small recording studio moved away and in its place there is now a Guns and Ammo store. This neighborhood isn't even on the mainland. It's on an island. "All the more reason to protect yourself," the blammer might say. Well, anyway, there are more armed households now than before, and from the sound of things, everyone is exercising their right of freedom.

I imagine these guys are innocent, comparatively speaking. Once, a while ago, a third grader whose home I was visiting (after I had visited his school), showed me his father's "secret room."

The room was hidden away behind a bookcase, which, when you pressed a button slid to the side.
I wondered if the boy was showing me a batman cave. But there were no stairs leading down. There was just this secret room, of which the boy was very proud. "Dad had this built," he said, "in case we are ever under attack."

I stared in disbelief at the hundreds of assault weapons mounted on the knotty pine walls. I saw grenades, rocket launchers, machine guns, and every kind of rapid-firing pistol and rifle you might imagine.

The feeling that came over me made me ticklish around the collar. I did not want to be there. Moreover, I did not want to see these weapons, nor have them shown to me by a child with whom I had spent part of the day telling stories. My stories were folklore; this was Hollywood.

"Who does your father think will attack?" I asked.

"The bad guys, the ones who don't believe in freedom."

Under the spreading oak by our small pond, the shooter exercises his constitutional rights.

The eagles have fallen silent. They know they are safe on our 2 1/2 acres of woodland. We have no secret rooms, no guns, no freedoms that do not include the animal world, which is what brought us here in the first place.

Wildman in Thailand

I have known Gregory Pleshaw since the early 80s when I was in my early forties and he was in his early teens, not yet out of middle school in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

I was Greg's 9th grade English teacher one year later. The kids called him Spanky because he looked like that Little Rascal. Greg's eyes were large and so was his appetite for adventure.

He did funny things, like on a camping trip at the end of the school year, when everybody was supposed to be asleep, we heard Greg at midnight yelling, "Let the games begin." It was a long night, I mean, morning.

And it's been a long night into morning knowing Greg as I have for thirty-some years, none of it, not one minute, boring. He is one of the most interesting people I know. Also one of the most talented -- as in the fount of a natural spring that bubbles madly and produces real literature. I wrote about his prodigious talent in my book of stories The American Storybag. I said, if I remember, that Greg was one of the best bloggers in the nation. His new book is Tales From Thailand. Blogs from Greg's bipolar, beat, huntersthompsonesque brain.

He wraps his thoughts fast, he raps them fast too. Part poet, part columnist, part fringes-madman, Greg lights upon subjects as quickly as they enter his frontal lobe. But maybe they don't. Maybe they come piping hot or cold from his "lizard brain" -- that stem that ties us to scales, claws, long tails -- hence, Tales From Thailand, a title with an obvious double meaning.

He lived and worked and prayed and loved and got caught in a pre-revolutionary upheaval and then ran away to India and disappeared into a monastery and was gone a long time.

Tales From Thailand is about feeding hungry ghosts -- and I do not mean this figuratively. In Thailand they actually feed them, and Greg did. He also floated down a river of dragons, and I do not mean this figuratively either. Thai people believe in dragons; they are not Harry Potterish pals, so when Greg, fully clothed and sitting upright in the fast moving green stream of life, went past village after village and stilted house after stilted house, the people ran out hollering for him to get out of the river. . . THE DRAGONS WILL GET YOU!

They didn't though. Nothing gets Greg except his own feverish mind, and you will be gotten by it too if you read his book. It's just out in digital and my wife and I proudly published it with the digital help of our designer Nancy Koucky of NRK Designs. It's only been out a few days. The dew is still upon it.

It's sounds corny to say, "Hey, you've got to read this!" But please do. At 2.99 it's a great deal, and you can read it on your PC, your Mac, your phone, your Nook, Kindle or iPad.  By the time you finish Tales From Thailand, we may have his next one out: Crazy in America. After reading the first one, you may belong in the second one. 

The Future is the Beginning: The Words and Wisdom of Bob Marley

The Future is the Beginning began as a series of visits back in the early eighties when, as a teacher of creative writing, I took my students to the Bob Marley Museum at 56 Hope Road in Kingston, Jamaica. We walked up the stairs to the second floor and there, in the first open room with big windows that fronted Hope Road, were walls and walls, floor to ceiling, full of Bob Marley’s spoken words. For years we visited Bob's old uptown Kingston home -- he'd brought the ghetto uptown, he once joked.

 

So here was the third world's first superstar captured in newsprint. Picture after picture, message after message. The person who wallpapered the room was Neville Garrick, a close friend of Bob Marley’s, a visual artist and Rastaman, who knew what it all meant. That it represented a significant history was clear to Garrick but not to the thousands of yearly visitors from all over the world who came to the Museum.

 

The words came mainly from newspaper interviews. Pasted directly on four walls and sealed in varnish, the newspapers dated back to the early seventies and, in some instances, the sixties. The visitors who came to this large (and one smaller room) didn't have the time or inclination to actually read the articles, the clippings, the yellowed linotype fading in the hot Kingston sun that filtered through the jalousie window slats.

 

It was on one of these visitations that I thought -- Bob is so alive here. He's talking to us all on the walls of 56 Hope Road. The people pass, curiosity seekers, going quietly from room to room. But they look and they don't listen. How can we get them to hear what Bob's saying?

 

That gave me and my daughter, Mariah, an idea. So we asked our friend, Cedella Marley if we might try to put together a collection of her father's interviews that would, quite literally, spring from the wall to pages of a book. First, we would record the clippings, put them on tape, translate the patois, and then arrange them into chapters. What struck me, then as well as now, is that these interviews had not been previously collected into one volume. Many of them were originally published in very small and obscure magazines and ephemeral newspapers that had come and gone long ago.

 

Cedella liked the idea, and told us to give it a try. So our family went to Kingston for a period of time and Mariah photographed and the two of us translated. The tours came through, as usual, and we were sprawled on the floor or on a ladder, transcribing, translating, recording.  Mariah got photographs of every newspaper and magazine article and I tape-recorded the talking walls of 56 Hope Road, and that is how this book began. Seven years later, we have an off-the-cuff Bob Marley book of aphorisms, wisdom, folk sayings, poetry, and straight talk. It may be a small book. But it covers a large geography. It’s Bob, as he was, as he is, as he will always be, talking to you.

 

 

Prairie Journey by Frances Bonney Jenner

Fran Jenner's first novel Prairie Journey took her more than six years to write. And probably four years of traveling the California Trail from St Louis to Sacramento. More years went into dreaming this book, thinking about it, hoping she could write it. She never took that for granted but she did have a poetess grandmother, Ida Mae Hudnall, for inspiration, and a name that rings western (Bonney, as in Billy the Kid). Somehow those incidentals inspire writers to write, and keep writing. Ida never gave up; neither did Billy. Fran couldn't either as she slept on the hard cold California Trail while asking herself under a sky chock full of stars . . . is this the way Savannah felt? Is this the way it feels when you are finally a thousand miles from home, your boyfriend is back there and you are just here, and the goldfields beckon and the good earth glares, not with fortunes but graves of those who were not so lucky.

But Fran was lucky. She finished her novel. Here is one little part of this page turning saga of the way West. . .

Split Rock

July 7, 1850

Mr. McAuley paced. Mrs. McAuley prayed. Mother stayed with them, all night, and she prayed too. Mr. McAuley went out again on horseback, at dawn, searching everywhere, begging and calling, but couldn't find a trace of them.

"We can't wait," Captain said. He pulled off his hat with one hand, rubbed his head with the other. "We'll die if we don't cross the Sierras before the snows fall. We waited for Katherine. Our time's used up."

Mrs. McAuley said, "Well, I'm not going, not without my boys." Mr. McAuley shuffled his feet, stared at the ground. "We got no choice. We'll catch you when they turn up."

"I'm sure sorry," Captain said, then started our wagons off towards Split Rock. Far ahead, I could see it, rising tall, it in the distance, its split, cut deep. I looked back as Mrs. McAuley leaned into the wagon, arms around her face, wailing, her body shaking all over. Mr. McAuley staring angry over the prairie. But there wasn't anything out there . . .

Mother read my mind. "Savannah, separating from the wagon train is like a death sentence."

"But, Mother . . . the McAuleys."

It was a while before she said, "Our staying won't bring Billy and Elijah back. It's a hard road . . . and we have no other." She wiped the sweat from her face and her lips tightened. She said, "Sometimes we're full of regrets about what we do, but we do it anyway, cause we can't see any other way."

These words weren't much comfort, so I said nothing. But I wanted to yell it, scream it, throw an almighty tantrum, cause I knew it was wrong to leave the McAuleys and I knew Mother knew it, too.

We might never see them again.

To plot or not to plot

In talking about writing, William Saroyan once remarked: "What difference does it make what you call it, just so it breathes?"

Following this thread, novelist Richard Brautigan, wrote a raft of novels that reviewers sometimes called Brautigans rather than novels.

The old rules fall away, but one seems to stick.

The importance of plot. Somehow you can't get away from it. For plot is -- if not everything -- all but the kitchen sink. Come to think of it, we shouldn't leave out the kitchen sink either. Especially if it's doing some gruesome gurgling. We may need that gurgle to further the plot.

Which brings me to Trent Zelazny's new novel, Too Late To Call Texas.

Trent is a plotter not a plodder, and his novels breathe, as Saroyan said they should.

What makes this novelist's stories gripping is that the plot is "everyman in trouble" compounded with what has been called the "irrelevant detail."

Example: a guy driving on a lonely New Mexico road at night finds a cowboy hat on a fence. Curious, (as are we all) the driver stops to check it out. The hat has a hole in the crown. There is a sticky something there, too. Blood? Yes.

One question after another comes up, one after another, in this hell-and-gone masterpiece that might have been called a "yarn" in another era.

I call his novels Trents. Because they all have this similar ring of truth. Something obscure is happening and we don't know what it is, but we want to find out, and do. By then we're at the end of the novel, ka-ching.

Trents thrive on curiosity. The same that killed the cat. His cats are characters, and they do sometimes die for curiosity. But often, the irrelevant details mount up, and one little thing leads to another larger thing, all of them coming down to a greedy, sneaky, dangerous, leaky, eeky thing.

Don't read Trents on an empty stomach -- or a too-full one. When I read them, I tend to eat the same things his characters eat. Huevos rancheros yesterday while I finished Too Late To Call Texas.

If you're a writer, you need to take a look at a whole bunch of Trents.

If you're a reader, you should read them all, eating as you go, but look out for that unforeseen low ledge because it'll knock you off your horse.

Unusual Friends

We recently did a column on unusual animal friends -- our parrot, George and our Great Dane, Zora. They are reluctant friends, really, because Zora accepts George's parrot affection but does not return it so much as permit it.

In the story of Cat and Crow by Lisa Fleming, it's different. 

Moses the crow saves the life of Cassie the kitten -- not once but several times.

True story, well-told, showing how very different creatures overcome their differences -- or perhaps they didn't know they had any. If humans could be more like this we wouldn't have two-party poltical systems. But that is another story . . . .

It's not uncommon to find odd-fellow friends in nature. Animal moms frequently adopt babies from other species. We have seen feral kittens with raccoon babies, and the moms treat the cats as kits. And the kitties end up as cats that wash their food in water.

We once witnessed a very unusual friendship between an 11-year old boy and a newborn fly. They became, one beautiful summer day, "best friends."  But here's the unusual part: the fly refused to leave the boy's forearm. The boy fed the fly sugar water and such and the fly might leave the boy for a second or two, but it always came back and settled on his arm.

This unusual friendship lasted one week. Whereupon the fly got old and died.

There was, in fact, a fly-in funeral. According to the boy, other flies dropped by to pay their last respects.

What is most amazing is that we, as humans, somehow manage to believe that cats and crows and boys and flies live on different planets and have nothing in common.