Welcome to the first installment of what I hope can become an occasional series here: You pose a question, and I answer it. Today's question came unprompted from a Facebook friend, and the answer illuminates an interesting little side story to the Edward series of books. Let's dig in: Q: I started reading 600 Hours of Edward yesterday, and in one edition I have he mentions the Billings Gazette, but in another it's the Billings Herald-Gleaner. Since this is a rare occasion when I can ask an author a question I have about a book when I have it, why is that? I don't know that I've ever addressed this in a wide-open public forum before. To grasp what happened here, we must go back to the writing of 600 Hours of Edward. That's a long time ago (late 2008) and far, far away. (OK, not really. I wrote that book about five miles from where I sit right now.) In late 2008, when I was writing the first draft of 600 Hours, I was working nights at the Billings Gazette as a copy editor. I saw no problem with using the actual name of the paper in the manuscript. The paper was a small part of the story, and the invocation of the paper's name was benign. Nobody got impugned. Also, at that point, I had no way of knowing that this one story I was sort of writing on a lark would ever be published. The idea that it might someday grow into what it became, spawning two subsequent novels, would have been preposterous to allow into my head. So ... let's fast-forward to 2012 ... 600 Hours has been out for a few years, and quite unexpectedly, it has become a little underground success story. It hasn't sold many copies, but it has received a couple of nice awards and some good press. The original publisher, a small press here in Montana, has decided to sell the publication rights to a much larger publisher with an international footprint. This larger concern acquires those rights with the idea that it will release a brand-new version of the book in August 2012, followed by the sequel, Edward Adrift, in 2013.
Edward Adrift, as I don't have to tell anyone who's read it, features the Billings newspaper as a much bigger plot player. And the references are far less complimentary. My problem: At this point, I still work at the Billings newspaper. Not good. Not comfortable. So I reach out to my new publisher with a suggestion: How about we change the name of the newspaper in the original story to something entirely fictitious (that right there is what we call plausible deniability!) and carry that new name through the sequel? Thus was born the Billings Herald-Gleaner (because if you're going to put a fake name on your newspaper, make it a funny one). I did realize we would leave some readers confused, but frankly, it's a pretty small number. I think the original version of 600 Hours of Edward sold fewer than 1,000 copies, and the 2012 re-release has sold upward of 200,000 across all of the languages in which it appears. For the vast preponderance of readers of the Edward books, the newspaper is and has always been the Billings Herald-Gleaner, not the Billings Gazette. Meanwhile, changing the newspaper's name meant I could continue to go to work without fear of having insulted my employer in a way that would have harmed either of us. A couple of final takeaways: My career at that newspaper ended just a few months after Edward Adrift was released, so I don't think changing the name of the paper in the book had any real effect, other than making me feel better about things. But there's a larger lesson here, one I've applied in the writing of subsequent books: It's fiction, so why not be fictitious? Business names, particularly, tend to be transient anyway. In an odd way, a piece of fiction can remain a lot more timely with invented references than it can with references to real-life things that might not survive a shift in fortunes or consumer habits.
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Friendships are funny things. Sometimes, they exist in a fixed place and time, sturdy and strong for a particular period in our lives. A counselor of mine, Jane Estelle, once told me that human relationships are often like cab rides. They have beginnings and ends. That was wise. It's true. Sometimes, though, friendships are a ride that never ends. You don't reach a station and get out of the car. You keep going, through years and locales and jobs and other relationships and seasons of your life. And sometimes they are both. They are fixed in time and endless. Those are the best friendships. Dan Gensel was that kind of friend to me. Dan Gensel is gone. I moved to Kenai, Alaska, in November of 1991. I was 21 years old, and I didn't know anybody there. I'd come from my hometown, North Richland Hills, Texas, and had taken a job as the sports editor at the Peninsula Clarion newspaper. Why? Why not? I was 21 and unencumbered. Alaska was far away. I wanted to go and could go, and that's a combination I wasn't always going to be able to put together. Now, for example. Couldn't do it. Won't do it. Want-to isn't even a factor. Years ago, I wrote a piece for the radio program Reflections West about that time in my life and the factors compelling me to move north. You can listen to it here. My first week in Alaska, I covered a Kenai Central High School-Soldotna High School girls basketball game. It featured two of the best players in the state, two of the best players in the history of the state: Stacia Rustad of Kenai and Molly Tuter of Soldotna. On one sideline was Coach Craig Jung of Kenai, a man I'd come to greatly admire in my brief time there. On the other sideline was Coach Dan Gensel. He and Craig were great friends and ardent competitors. Stacia and Kenai were coming off a state championship; Molly and Soldotna would win one a year later. I didn't know any of that. I was just a new-in-town sportswriter, trying to figure things out. The photo above, of Dan and Melissa Smith, one of the kids I covered that season, isn't from the game in question, but it's a good approximation of the Dan Gensel of my memories. After the game, which Kenai won, he sat in the bleachers with me and just talked. Where you from? How'd you come to this job? What's your background? Getting-to-know-you stuff. I liked him, right from the start. Later, I met his wife, Kathy, and his daughter, Andrea, and liked them, too. In time, it became love. But it was like, from the get-go. Those were lonely days for me, 4,000 miles from home, alone, barely scraping by, driving an on-the-verge Ford Escort and living in a one-room apartment. Dan and Kathy took me out for my 22nd birthday, just a few months later. Dan gave me seats on school buses to far-flung tournaments and let me sleep on his hotel room floor sometimes when that was the difference between my being able to cover something and not. He also gave me a basketball education, one I tucked away, then unveiled when I wrote a short story about a wunderkind basketball player and a coach and a town that loses all sense of proportion. Here's an excerpt from Somebody Has to Lose: “Mendy, it’s like this.” He squared up to the basket, squeezing the ball between his hands and planting a pivot foot. “First option: jump shot.” Into the air he went, releasing the ball at the peak of his jump and watching it backspin softly into the net. Cash, her face red, gathered the ball and rifled it back to him. “Second option: drive.” Paul took two dribbles into the lane and then fell back to his spot on the periphery. “Third option: make the next pass.” He slung the ball to Victoria Ford, directly to his left on the wing. “You know better than to just throw the ball over without even looking.” Paul turned to the players clumped on the sideline. “Shoot, drive, pass. When you get the ball in this offense, that’s the sequence. I don’t want anybody not following it, you got that?” Yes, sir,” the girls answered glumly. "You get the ball. If the defender has collapsed into the middle, you shoot the open shot. If they’re crowding you, drive around them. If you’re covered, make the next pass. This is not difficult. Run it again.” That right there, in just a few paragraphs, is the Dan Gensel philosophy of basketball. It inverts the conventional wisdom of the time—pass first, shoot later—into a kinetic, high-scoring, fun way of playing. And, man, was he ever successful. Won a lot of games. Won a state championship. Made the hall of fame. But that's not what I remember most about him. I remember that he and Kathy and Andrea became family, particularly after I came back to Alaska in 1995 for a three-plus-year stint at the Anchorage Daily News. I remember that I was a regular guest on their downstairs couch, so much so that it developed an imprint of me. I remember that they tolerated movie nights when I'd make them watch Ed Wood and Pulp Fiction, fare that was decidedly not up their alley. I remember later visits in California and Las Vegas. I remember Andrea's wedding in the early aughts down in San Diego, when Dan asked me to give the speech before the father's speech. Predictably, I went for funny and warm, extolling my love for a family and a young woman I'd watched grow up. Dan, after me, had everybody in tears with his love for his little girl. Later, in a quiet moment between us, Dan said, "I knew you'd take them one way and I'd bring them back the other." Teamwork, baby. I remember Dan's closing out the wedding reception by climbing atop a table and lip-synching "Don't Stop Believing." I hate that song, but I love that man. I remember, a few years later, Dan's serving as the best man at my first wedding. The marriage didn't last. The friendship endured. I remember all the times we talked about getting together over the past decade or so. I remember that we didn't make it happen. That'll be the only thing I regret. It's like I said: It's a friendship fixed in time and eternal. I'll carry it now, for however long I'm around. There's been a lot of that these past few years. Too much. ![]() It's been a long while since Dan was a basketball coach. In his final years, he was a sports radio guy--a damned good one—and a grandpa, a role he made his own in an inimitable way. He and Kathy became community stalwarts in Soldotna. Andrea and her husband, Lee, are right there. It's been a good life. It will continue to be a good life, I'm sure, but those who love Dan will have to live with a big hole in it. It's a testament to the community Dan helped me build thirty-odd years ago that one of his former players, someone with whom I've been close since I was a 21-year-old green sportswriter riding a school bus, contacted me with the news. I spent just six months in that job at the Peninsula Clarion. My Facebook page is full of people I knew then and still know now, and I'm a lucky boy, indeed. Dan was 34 when I met him and 66 when he died, and that's both a long time and not nearly enough of it. I'll miss him. I. On the Feeling![]() My tenth novel, Dreaming Northward (Gramarye Media), comes out on June 27, 2023. I’m no more impervious to big, round numbers than anyone else is, and the imminent publication of a tenth novel—particularly when I once had serious, serious doubts that I’d ever write, much less publish, even one—is a good occasion for a bit of reflection. I’ve learned a lot about how to do this, enough that sometimes I’m even prepared to believe I’ve gotten good at it. I’ve learned a lot about humility, which forecloses any chance that I’ll linger long on “gee, I’ve gotten good at this.” I’ve learned a lot about what’s fleeting and what’s durable. I’ve learned that it’s all about love. What that last bit looks like, for me, hinges on memory and imagination, the crucial elements of fiction, in my estimation, but also fairly punchless without love. It’s loving the work. Loving the characters who get conjured in the work. Loving each new project with the whole of your heart, even if—and especially if—you must love it enough to let it go. There has been a lot of this, more than I ever imagined there could be. When I get down to diagnosing why an idea didn’t take off the way I hoped it would, I almost always land on a memory to which I’ve insufficiently connected, which bogs down the imagination that is supposed to turn it into fiction, which subsequently demands the love that makes me say “this is not for me.” (If I were as good at that in my beyond-the-page life as I am in my writing life, I wouldn’t bruise so easily. But I digress.) Conversely, the idea that soars, that becomes something I see through to completion, is almost always built on the back of a memory, slathered with imagination, that becomes something else again. It’s almost magical, that feeling, even as it remains hard, word-rock-busting work to bring it forth. I love (that word again) that feeling. I chase it. Again and again and again. II. On Memory and LoveA couple of years back, in an interview with Montana Quarterly (where I’ve been on the masthead since 2013), the great Larry Watson said something so profound that my greatest wish was that I’d said it first. Failing that, I cite this quote endlessly, with all due credit to Mr. Watson: I write from memory, not observation. Yet my memories are formed from observations, and then memory and imagination distort those observations into something useful for fiction and something that’s also truthful in its own way. That’s the ballgame, right there. Unsaid, but screamingly evident to anyone who has read Watson’s work, is the part where love comes in. That manifests in doing the work, in riding the work out, in achieving empathy with your characters, in knowing when to make the gradual turn from I’m writing this to engage my own need for the work to I’m writing this for someone to read someday, and thus I must be attentive to what it needs to be. Love is showing up faithfully. Love is holding at bay the world that will threaten your enthusiasm, your want-to, your ability to separate those things over which you have control and those that are mysterious variables. Love is having a standard for the work. Love is absolving yourself when, say, a pandemic swallows up your work like it never existed in the first place. It did exist. Your love made it manifest. Love is also forgiving yourself when you could have done better and somehow didn’t. Love is believing that you’ll do right by it the next time. Love is faith, and you’re gonna need a lot of it. Arthur Miller—I borrow only from the best—knew something about the staying power of the deeply imprinted memory. Perhaps nothing is as creatively propulsive as the blown chance, the missed boat, the shameful moment, the deep regret, the thing you ache to understand, the love you couldn’t hold. Here he is: Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets. If you’ve had a bit of therapy—and only about eight percent of us have, which means ninety-two percent of us are in deficit—you’ve probably been told that regret is a feeling wasted on the unsustainable belief that you should have been perfect. Insofar as it applies to our lives and how we face up to them, I’m inclined to concede the point. But for the author who mines memory for stories, regret—particularly the right kind, which Miller doesn’t identify and thus is open to personal definition—is creative fuel. As I look back on ten novels, I see work and characters suffused with what I could give them through my grappling with memory and regret. Neurodivergent Edward Stanton (600 Hours of Edward, Edward Adrift, Edward Unspooled) and his fights with an illogical world. Mitch Quillen and his intractable father (The Summer Son). Hugo Hunter and his clay feet as a fighter and a father and a friend (The Fallow Season of Hugo Hunter). The Kelvig clan and their town and the pulling apart of what binds them (This Is What I Want). Sad-sack Carson McCullough and the demise of the newspaper business (Julep Street). Jo-Jo and Linus and the vagaries of attraction (You, Me & Mr. Blue Sky). Max Wendt and the status quo he doesn’t see crumbling (And It Will Be a Beautiful Life). And now, Dreaming Northward, perhaps the most personal work of them all, one that required me to find the memory—and, always, the love—and enough imagination to make it something more than a transcript. So much more. So surprising in the end. So familiar that it could have kissed me. I’m in love. It keeps happening. III. On Imagination and LoveHow does this memory-fortified-with-imagination-backed-by-love thing work, in practical terms? I have an object lesson for that, drawn from Dreaming Northward and its ingredients. The memory If I’m prompted to give a short-hand accounting of who I am and how I got here, I say that I grew up in Texas and found my way to Montana as quickly as I could. The truth is a bit more nuanced. I wasn’t that quick. I got here when I was thirty-six years old, time enough for a dozen places in the interim that I tried, to varying degrees of success to make home. My first home, in fact, after I was born in Washington state and adopted by my parents, was in Mills, Wyoming, a little bedroom community north of Casper. For the first three years of my life, I lived in tiny clapboard house on an unpaved street, which sat across the road from one of the town’s water towers. After my mother left my father and moved us to Texas, I was largely absent from Mills save for occasional summer visits to see my dad. But the image of that water tower embedded in my psyche. Whenever I would see one like it, particularly in my suburban Texas town, I would feel the pangs of separation from my father. The imagination, in excerpt form Ronnie goes down to the floor with his boy for a close-up view of the gas station in miniature. He watches as two round-headed figurines in a car, into which they fit like pegs, ride the elevator up to the top floor and the door opens and the car rolls out and careers down the ramp to the carpet beneath them. “Ain’t that something?” he says, and the boy squirms happily. “I got it for Christmas last year,” Nathan says. “I remember,” Ronnie says, a harmless lie, he thinks. “Hey, I saw that kid Richard, your friend, the other day. He says hello.” “He’s nice,” Nathan says. “Yeah, he’s a good kid.” Nathan bounces up and grabs his father’s hand. Ronnie clambers to his feet. “Come here,” Nathan says, tugging him. “OK.” Nathan pulls him to the window that looks out upon the suburban expanse. “See that?” “Yeah,” Ronnie says. “Buildings.” “No, that.” Nathan points, insistent. “What?” “The blue thing.” Ronnie stares down. “What blue thing?” “No, there.” The boy redirects his indicator, trying to get his father to follow the line. “The water tower?” “Yes.” “Yeah, I see it,” Ronnie says. “That’s where you live.” “It is?” “Yes. I live here. You live over there.” “No, son.” “Yes.” “No.” Ronnie makes a quarter-turn, facing the wall. He points at the blankness of it. “It looks the same as our water tower, but I live a thousand miles that way. North. Where you used to live.” He turns back to the window and points again. “That over there, that’s east. Understand?” “No.” “Well, come downstairs, Sport, and I’ll try to explain it, OK?” The love It starts with what I feel, and have felt, for my father, a love that’s been constant but ever changing, ever shifting depending on the circumstances we find ourselves in. The unquestioning adoration I had for him when I was a little boy got replaced by an exasperated pity the more I learned about him and the more I witnessed. That, in turn, got supplanted by the responsibility I take for him in his dotage, the insistence I have of seeing him off this mortal coil and keeping fear, terror, and pain as far from him as I can. As his infirmities grow and he lashes out, I find myself with more and more days when I love him and simultaneously hope I can find a way to like him again. It’s not for wimps, this love thing. The water tower the boy points at insistently was, and is, in a Mid-Cities suburb between Fort Worth and Dallas, a town called Hurst. I used to climb into the tallest tree of my neighborhood in an adjoining town and find it on the flat horizon and try to convince myself that it was Mills, Wyoming, and that my father might be there at the base of it. I didn’t know north from east in those days. I couldn’t have envisioned the magnitude of a thousand miles. I just knew blue, cylindrical water towers and that one was in proximity of a man I missed. I tucked it all away. Years later, it came out through my fingertips. That’s love. IV. On the Things That Aren't LoveSoon after my third novel, Edward Adrift, came out in 2013, I was making enough money in royalties to grant serious consideration to trying to make a go of it as a full-time novelist. I had the big-time New York agent, a slew of foreign translations, a full calendar, and novels-in-progress lined up on the runway. My then-publisher had feted the onset of our relationship with “we want to be in the Craig Lancaster business.” That’s something—indeed, I suspect it’s something that most any author not in the one percent craves—but it’s not love. It’s validation, it’s success, it’s the fruits of one’s efforts, it’s unadulterated luck, but it’s not love. Love is what you give yourself when the royalties dry up, the big-time New York agent moves on from you, the foreign translations are harder to attract, the calendar is empty, and the ideas are taking on rust. When your publisher doesn’t want to be in the you business anymore. These are all things that can shoot your horse right out from under you. I’m not suggesting that you—or anyone—should just buck up and get through it, as if it’s not there, in your path like a boulder you can’t circumnavigate. Lean on your supports. Get your ass into therapy if you need it (ninety-two percent of us do!). Divert yourself with a hobby or a road trip or whatever. Take some time off, if that’s what’s calling to you. Don’t stop pushing, if pushing is what’s demanded.
And while you’re doing all of that, remember the love. The love of a memory, an idea, an approach. The love of the work. The love of the characters and the settings and the structure of what you’re trying to create. The love of revising it and honing it until it’s just what you want. The love of taking the finished thing—the first or the tenth or the hundredth—and offering it up with a hopeful, open heart. I made this. I fell in love. Again.
* Not just the words to a Christopher Cross/Burt Bacharach/Carole Bayer Sager/Peter Allen song.
Sorry. I had to.
Wait, strike that. I'm not sorry. ![]()
The possible mechanical aspects of the writing life—what to write, when to write, what time to write, how much to write, etc.—are so many and so varied that I've discovered I can disagree with just about anything, given the opportunity to formulate a contrary opinion or just to wake up in a mood.
But once in a while, something crosses my desk or screen that inspires nothing but rabid agreement in me. My friend Tiffany Yates Martin—in fairness, my wife's editor on several projects, but I joined the two of them for a memorable and hilarious lunch in Austin, so I'm claiming her—wrote just such a piece earlier this week. You can read it for yourself, but here are just a couple of the stellar observations: I think there’s danger in talking about our writing in a diminishing way. Most obviously it sends us the message that our creative work isn’t that important or worthwhile. It’s just a lark, a silly little whim we pursue, but we’re not kidding ourselves that we can stand beside the actual greats of literature. And ... That means having a clear-eyed view of your work and where there may be room for improvement and growth, while also allowing yourself to be proud of its merits and strengths. Without that how can we hope to improve as artists, any more than a child who is given nothing but criticism and disapproval can develop a healthy self-image and flourish? We have to create a safe space for ourselves as artists where we have permission to fail, permission to grow. Seriously, if you are one of those "oh, I just write [whatever]" or "I just dabble" writers, go read Tiffany's piece and see if, perhaps, there's a way to recast your thinking into something that's realistic and celebratory. You create things. You conjure stories and experiences. You're awesome. Never forget it. ![]()
Years ago, after my second novel, The Summer Son, came out, it landed reviews in two regional publications that I fervently hoped would shower it with praise. I was riding high, at least from a critical standpoint, having seen my debut, 600 Hours of Edward, receive wide praise and some nice awards. I thought I'd written an even better book with The Summer Son, so I readied myself for an onslaught of plaudits.
The novel went 0-for-2 in redeeming those hopes. The review in New West was generally complimentary but cast the book as falling short of its predecessor. The review in the Missoula Independent was more of a split-personality assessment—which, interestingly, is what the reviewer accused my book of having—with effusive praise for the character development and something bordering on ridicule for the plotting. I know what my reaction was, in both cases: something deeper than disappointment and a bit short of despondency. (I suppose I'm blessed/cursed by not really giving a damn what you think of me, but I get a little bruised when my work isn't seen favorably.) It was fascinating to see reactions from my friends and colleagues. A couple called me to make sure I was OK. One told me the Independent piece was an unqualified great review, a point of view I had a little trouble accessing. (Her point, I believe, is that character development is the gold standard of literary work, and I'd won the critic over with that part of my effort. OK, then.) The point of all this isn't to indulge in ancient grudges, although if I were so inclined, I'd point out that both New West and the Independent are dead and The Summer Son still puts money in my pocket every month, so chomp on that, fellas. But I am not so inclined. The fact is, the literary life of the West is poorer for those publications' absence, no matter how wrong they were on occasion. (OK, maybe just a little jab.) No, seriously, my point is this, and it's one I've made again and again: If you want something you can influence with regard to your work, better to forget how it'll be received, whether it will sell, if it'll make you rich, and put all of your attention on doing the absolute best work you're capable of undertaking at the time you undertake it. If you do that, if you're certain it's the best that you can do, you will owe no one anything. You will owe only yourself, and only this: growth, the gumption to try even harder the next time, a willingness to stretch yourself beyond what you think is possible. Some years after those reviews, I was talking with the guy who wrote the one for New West, a good friend of mine and a damn fine writer, and told him he'd certainly been right about certain things. I'd grown. I could see flaws I didn't see at the time I wrote it. I said something like "if I could do it over again, I would." And he set me straight: "Don't ever say that about your own work. Don't ever put it down." Absolutely right. You made that. Love it for what it is. Save "I should have done better" for next time, then do it. I'm more than a month into my new full-time job--more on that here—and have settled into a rhythm that both suits and serves me. This weekend has been the first time in that month-plus that I've been able to turn my attention to my current manuscript, which makes it, perhaps, a longer absence than I anticipated. But, hey, career changes are big deals. My focus has been in the right place. The biggest change, aside from the parameters of the job, has been to my sleep schedule. I've spent the preponderance of a career as a swing-shifter—4 or 5 p.m. to midnight or 1 a.m. In my younger days, I embraced the full inversion of that schedule. I'd come home, make dinner, fire up the TV, talk on the phone, whatever, then go to bed around 5 a.m. or 6 a.m. Wake up after noon, eat breakfast, head off to work. Lather, rinse, repeat. Later on, I realized how much of the day was getting away from me that way and adjusted. Home, directly to bed, wake up at 7 a.m. or so, have hours and hours to my own devices before I headed to work. I wrote a lot of novels that way. Back in January, my thinking was along these lines: I'll wake up at 5:45 a.m., write, eat breakfast, then start my workday. ![]() It hasn't worked out that way. Oh, I'm waking up early. And I'm answering email, paying bills, doing whatever can be done when much of the world is asleep, then reporting to duty in my sweet home office. (Seriously, my office is the BEST. I'm sitting here at the short end of the L-shaped desk, writing this as a warmup to today's work on the manuscript, and listening to the Flying Burrito Brothers on vinyl. You tell me how life could possibly be better. I dare you.) When I get off work in the early evening, I'm too fried to write. I eat, I visit my dad, I tend to small errands, then I trudge upstairs for another go-round with Mr. Sandman. Can't write in the morning, so what to do? Easy. Write on weekends. I have no absence of motivation to do so, and no absence of weekends to put those writing hours into. Point is, I can write a lot of novels this way, too. ![]() The whole thing puts me in mind of a meme I shared on Facebook this past week, one that got a lot of traction with my artist-heavy social group. And it's something, perhaps, I don't focus on enough when I'm putting my hopes on this book or that book to connect widely and to ratchet down the financial pressures of daily American life. I don't do it for money. And I say that in a non-starry-eyed way, and in a way that's not too idealistic for my own good. The point is that being compelled toward the arts comes from a deeper place, a deeper need to make sense of the world and to contribute something to it that doesn't traffic in cynicism and power. Do I wish I had a better nose for generating straight cash, or that maybe I'd made different decisions along the way that would have augured more to the benefit of my bottom line? Sure. Absolutely I do. But I'm not dead yet. There's still time. Once I started getting comfortable with the multiplicity of ways I can define myself, it released me to embrace my multitudes. I can be an analyst and a content specialist. I can be a friend and a husband. I can be a brother and a son and an uncle. And, damn right, I can be an artist on my terms, in my time, trying to make a contribution from my cozy little office with a turntable and a drink fridge. I not only can but also am gonna. Just watch me. ![]() Elisa and I took our new presentation, title above, out for its first spin Saturday at the Stillwater County Library in Columbus, Montana. (Cool side note: The centerpiece pictured here was on our table at Grand Fortune, a Chinese restaurant in Columbus that we hit before the event. I can definitely say that's a career first for me. For Elisa, too.) To say that we were thrilled with the response to our program would be, perhaps, to diminish the meaning of "thrilled." We had a group of about 20 people who dug in with us, asked excellent questions and provided terrific insights, and even gamely took on a writing exercise at the end. The idea was to take The Word—the go-to warmup exercise I've written about from time to time—and apply the principles of memory harvesting to create the short fictional work that resulted. So we had the folks give us a passel of words, then we ran a random-number generator to choose one that would apply to everyone's work. That word: hayloft. Elisa and I wrote along with everyone else. I had the advantage of my laptop, so I was able to write about 630 words in the 20 minutes of the exercise. As I told everybody afterward, if the current manuscript took on words that quickly, I'd be done with it back in November. Of 2020. What follows is my effort ... HayloftMom told me I would be sorry if I didn’t go, if I didn’t see where my grandfather, her father, had grown up. I was dubious, to say the least. I liked our hotel, I liked the pool—the pool was about the only thing that made southwestern Minnesota in summer bearable to me—and I wanted to stay. She insisted that I go. I was nine. Guess who won that debate? The whole way over, our 1978 Chevy Citation baking on the blacktop, Mom told me that she’d only been here once, long, long ago, when she was a little girl, after grandpa had come back from the war in Italy. “It was like a magical place, Jeff,” she said, and I sat there thinking she should see some better magic. “Tractors. Gardens. Corn you can eat off the stalk. A hayloft, Jeff, with a tire swing. You can launch yourself clear into the rafters and come down in a soft landing.” I harumphed. Something good was on TV, and I was missing it. We made a little turn off the two-laner and went down this rutted two-track, between two fields of corn headed for silage. I wasn’t going to be eating anything off these stalks, I figured, but seeing as how I was a civilized boy, I didn’t need anything that didn’t come in a can anyway. But maybe I could slop the hogs and shovel out the chicken coop. Boy, howdy. At the end of the lane stood my grandfather, all unfolded six-foot-six of him, encased like a sausage in denim overalls and a gingham workshirt. I’d never seen him looking like that before; the guy was a navigator for Alaska Airlines, not a goat roper, but I guess it was the same nostalgia trip for him that it was for Mom, making his way to the place where he’d grown up. Beside him, another couple—that’d be great Uncle Leo and great Aunt Darlaine, I supposed, the proprietors now of the farm. I’d never met them, I didn’t think. Mom started crying once they came into view, and I shrank down in the seat, both because they were all waving stupidly at us and because Mom cried a lot that summer, and it had become clear I couldn’t do much other than let her hug my neck. We got out. Grandpa came at us, and Mom collapsed into him, crying at a stronger pitch. He folded her in like the bear of a man he was, and he reached out with a mitt and pulled me in, too. “We’ve been waiting,” he said. “I know,” Mom said, her voice muffled by his overalls. “I don’t think I remembered how far out it is.” Leo and Darlaine, having waited their turn, moved in, too. More hugs. More crying. Pinched cheeks on me, Darlaine’s doing, as she called me a beautiful boy. Torture. Sheer torture. “Jeff,” Grandpa said, holding me at an arm’s length. “What do you have to say for yourself?” “Nothing,” I said. “Well, you’ll need to do better than that.” “Mom says you’ve got corn here I can eat,” I said. “That we do.” “Where?” I asked. “Soon,” he said. “I’ll show you. What do you think of the place?” I cast a look around, for his benefit. All of them—Mom, Grandpa, Leo, Darlaine—had a look like something major would be hinging on my answer. “I’ve seen better,” I said. And then, deflation, right down the line. Grandpa gripped me by the neck, a gesture that looked loving enough but had a little pinch to it. I’d been mouthy. I knew I’d best not be mouthy again. “Well,” he said, “maybe that’s so. But someday you’ll lose a few things, and you’ll know better.” Because part of the exercise involves sharing both the memory and how the imagination was applied to it, here's closing the circle:
The memory: Hayloft was a word that led just about everybody to a farm, in one way or another. A word like that spawns more similarities, even in a large group, than a word like, say, forgettable would. I thought of the farm my grandfather grew up on, which I saw only once, when I was a little boy. I grabbed the name of his younger brother, Leo, and Leo's wife, Darlaine, because it was easier than making up new names. But Leo and Darlaine weren't the proprietors of the farm back then. (That would have been Forrest, another brother, and his wife, Margaret.) Everything else is imagination ... The imagination: Jeff's grandmother is conspicuous by her absence. My grandmother lived until 2017. Jeff's father isn't in the picture. Mine, both of mine, definitely were and are. I can't say I wasn't mouthy, or even that I don't remain mouthy, but I wasn't mouthy like that. I don't remember a hotel. Pretty sure we slept in campground barracks along with the rest of the out-of-town relatives that summer. Soon after that 1979 family reunion, we started losing people, which I'm sure is why it remains so firmly lodged in my mind. And so it goes. Really cool, unexpected, interesting things happen when I do The Word. It's why I love it so. As I write this, it's late morning on Sunday, January 8, and I have spent an entire week living my new schedule. It looks something like this: 5:45 a.m.: Wake up, shower, tend to the dog, have some juice. 6:15 a.m.: Head downstairs to my office and begin writing. 7:30-7:45 a.m.: Head upstairs for breakfast. 8:30 a.m.: Start the rest of my workday. The rest of my workday is the part I've been waiting on. If this post is up and you're reading it, I've at last begun it. ![]() My ready-for-a-new-job office, starting from the left bottom corner: reading nook, Fretless' kennel, writing space on the short side of the L-shaped desk, work station on the long side, stereo set. Out of the frame: book library and vinyl library. There's a drink fridge there under the left speaker. A comfortable office is an efficient office. I started working in a way that supports me when I was 18 years old, which means I've been at it for a long, long time. Most of that work has tied into a life of letters: I was a newspaper reporter before I was an editor, then I was a newspaper editor and a novelist, then I was a novelist and a freelance editor/graphic designer, then I was a novelist, freelance editor/graphic designer and pipeline inspection specialist (the latter being the wild card in my working life), then I was a digital journalist, a novelist, a freelance editor/graphic designer and a pipeline inspection specialist, then I dropped that last bit through no choice of my own.
As of today, I am an analyst/content specialist with a data research group that advises financial services on how to evolve digitally. And a novelist. And a freelance editor/graphic designer (although I'll be much choosier about my projects now). This new job, which I'm entirely stoked to begin, came about in a way that's reminiscent of how I've always found the most sustaining work I've done: a connection, an unforeseen opportunity, a perhaps surprising love of the work, and away we go. I've gotten to know folks at my new job over a series of years, working with them on a freelance basis first and now as a full-timer. Job changes, by their nature, can be stressful and uncertain. The way this came together mitigates some of that. I feel fortunate. And I'm just entirely grateful to have the opportunity, at this juncture of my life, to plant myself in something new and learn new skills while also applying the old ones in new ways. In the broad view, what I've always done is tell stories (pipelining, perhaps, notwithstanding, although have you met Max Wendt?). Here I go again. If this were a streamlined operation—with a social-media team that optimized content for maximum impact—this post would be going up on the last day of the year or the first day of the next one. But this ain't a streamlined operation. It's one guy in a basement office (sitting at a brand-new desk, though!) who has to work the swing shift on the last day of the year, so this is getting written now. If something materially affects what I write hereafter—say, I win the lottery—I'm gonna be so disappointed.* (*—No, I'm not. Send the checks to me directly. I'll be super happy.) All right. Here we go: Looking back on 2022 and ahead to 2023, in categorical form for easy reading ... Proudest moment (books) Easy pick: Hearing the words And It Will Be a Beautiful Life called out as the 2022 High Plains Book Award winner in fiction. There's a lot to unwrap here, so briefly: I was proud because I came home to Billings almost three years ago, and this was the first novel published (and so far the only, but more on that in a bit) since I reestablished myself here. The love I felt for and from my town that night, and really the entire time I've been back, was such a rush. It had been 12 years since I won my first HPBA, when they were a much smaller-scale affair, and I was, and am, awed by the caliber of books that get that recognition these days. The HPBAs are, simply put, one of the preeminent regional literary awards out there. I'm honored that my book was found worthy of one. I got a lovely note from a friend the day after the awards ceremony, asking if I ever thought I'd win another, after the 2010 Best First Book designation for 600 Hours of Edward. Quite truthfully, I did not. It would be audacious to think such a thing, anyway. It's all gratitude here, not swollen heads. ![]() Proudest moment (work) An imprecise classification, for sure (books are work), but how else to account for what most writers have to do to keep writing? I'm speaking here of holding down a job. The thing is, a job—at least for me—can never just be something I do. On some level, it has to be something I am, which is why I've made my way since I was 18 years old as a journalist (initially and again), a pipeline safety worker (much to my surprise), and a freelance editor. All of these things have spoken to the pragmatic desire to pay the mortgage and feed the mouths, but they also have reflected what I really enjoy doing and a broad set of skills that I've accumulated over a long career. I can't say much about this yet, but early in the new year, I'm changing careers. It's a line of endeavor that came into my life as a bit of a surprise, but I've both excelled at it and found myself feeling deep affinity for it, and in my experience that's the combination that leads to high job satisfaction and high performance. I can't wait to get started. In the meantime, you may admire my reconstituted office. I'll be spending a lot of time here in the new year. Scary moment that turned out OK In July, Fretless the Dog and I bounded into the car and headed south to Colorado. My stepfather had taken ill on a vacation in the Denver area, and the doctors needed a bit to figure out what was wrong with him. All turned out well. And I got a bonus visit with my folks and my nephew Asher. Plus this beautiful shot of the Wyoming sky near Casper as I drove through just before twilight. Scarier moment that turned out OK In December, just a few weeks ago, another medical emergency, another southerly drive, this time to Texas. My stepfather—a remarkably healthy man, but also almost 81 years old and subject to the rigors of the age—suffered the widowmaker heart attack and was one of the lucky few who survive it. Everything was in place for a successful outcome: nearby paramedics, a responsive ambulance, a quick-working team at the hospital, and a skilled cardiologist who was able to get him unblocked and home within a few days. If you've read And It Will Be a Beautiful Life, you know that my main character, Max Wendt, also suffered a widowmaker and lived to tell the tale: “Your left anterior descending artery. It was blocked.” “And that’s why—” “That’s why you collapsed, yes.” The man’s matter-of-fact demeanor irritated Max. Another day at work for him. The biggest damn deal ever for me. “So I’ve got a plugged ticker?” Max asked. McFeely—Bradshaw!—looked surprised by the question. “Well, no. Not now.” “No?” “Don’t you see?” he said. “You’re here. You survived. We’ve dealt with it.” “You have?” “A stent. You’ll be taking Plavix for a while, or maybe forever. Who knows? Not much damage to the muscle.” “Plavix?” “To prevent clotting.” “Ah.” “You see, Mr. Wendt,” Bradshaw said now, drawing nearer the side of the bed, “the survival is the thing. Without that, the rest is…unnecessary.” “Sure.” “Do you understand what I’m saying to you?” “I guess not,” Max said. The doctor knelt now, eye to eye with Max. “The widowmaker. That’s what we call what happened to you.” “Funny,” Max said. “I’m almost divorced.” ![]() So, again, Fretless and I hit the road, a much longer trip this time. And coming back, we got caught in the jaws of a winter storm in Kansas (where we were stranded for a night in a motel straight out of 1978) and endured a bizarre same-day-care visit earlier that same day. (You really, really don't want to know, so all I'll say is that I didn't know that could happen or that it could bleed so much. BUT THAT'S IT!) Again, all was well that ended well, and I got to tag a bonus visit with my family (and some dear friends, including my junior high basketball coach, Buddy Hamm, at left) onto the end of the year. But still: scary, scary. Best I never saw that coming What a treat to have a table read of my full-length play, Straight On to Stardust, performed by the troupe from Yellowstone Repertory Theatre at This House of Books in Billings. It was a wonderful showcase, and I received some invaluable feedback on how to make it better. Still hoping for a full production. Fingers crossed. Want to see the reading? Go here! Best trip (overall) It seems like a long time ago now, but Elisa and I went to Texas on vacation. It was a long time coming, as we emerged from the worst ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic (although one of us—nods at her—caught it about a month later) and grabbed some moments of normalcy. We saw the Dallas Mavericks play. We went to the coast. We saw family and friends. We needed it, every single moment. The trip also included a swing out to New Mexico to say goodbye to a friend. I miss him, every day. We celebrated the man we love and mourned the one who left us too soon. ![]() Best trip (with a dog) Fretless and I took three trips together this year (four if you count the one above), and two of them were missions of medical need, so those don't count. Our June trip to North Dakota—seriously, North Dakota—was a much-needed getaway for me and a reconnection with a job I used to do and was missing terribly. I was able to figure out what, exactly, I missed. (Hint: It was the travel. It is the travel. However much I'm doing, I need more.) I'm grateful that I got to enjoy that time with my little buddy. At left, he scopes out the city park in Sidney, Montana, as we made our way home. Best general gratitude I alluded to this earlier, but nearly three years after I returned home, I feel as fully connected to my community as I ever felt in version 1.0 of living here. I know who has my back. I know whose backs I have. I have friends in abundance (and am making more all the time), I've repaired ruptures, I've been granted grace, and I've extended it. I can't remember when I've looked forward to a coming year with such clear-minded hope. I'm not Pollyanna. I'm Craig. And for the first time in a long time, I'm totally cool with being that. Thanks for being here. I mean that sincerely. And may the year that's coming see you through your hopes, your dreams, and your challenges and deliver love and memories. As for 2023 ... This being the blog of an active writer and all, yeah, I hope you'll enjoy the books I have coming down the pike for you. There are two of them: the paperback version of And It Will Be a Beautiful Life (same great story, less lethality if someone smites you with it), which is coming out in late April, and the hardcover release of my new novel, Dreaming Northward (please contrast the beautiful Monte Hurlbert painting on the cover with that shot of the Wyoming sky earlier in this post and marvel at the man's talent). The new one drops on May 9, and we'll have a launch party in Billings on May 13, so keep an eye on my events calendar for more details. You're invited. I'll play you out with some praise for Dreaming Northward. So grateful to these fine writers for their endorsements:
“Sheer reading pleasure; at turns funny, heartbreaking, suspenseful, and cathartic.”--Jonathan Evison, bestselling author of Small World and Lawn Boy “With Dreaming Northward, Lancaster taps his rich Texas roots of poverty, displacement, and tangled family troubles in the story of a man who road trips to Montana with nothing left to lose. ... Lancaster’s exquisite attention to his characters’ bad choices makes readers feel seen, chronicled by a tender biographer—even a little redeemed.”--Carrie La Seur, award-winning author of The Home Place and The Weight of an Infinite Sky “Craig Lancaster gives us the eternal mystery of family and the tangled webs across generations, with a cast of disparate yet wholly realized characters whose various struggles, questions, fault lines and quiet triumphs quickly become our own. Poignant, big-hearted, and as always, beautifully rendered.”--Malcolm Brooks, author of Painted Horses and Cloudmaker “There is something true and honest on every single page of this right hook of a novel. Craig Lancaster’s Dreaming Northward follows the entwined lives of people who’ve never known anything but hard times and who’ve never known the word quit.”--Giano Cromley, author of The Prince of Infinite Space and The Last Good Halloween “‘Wyoming is a lonesome poem whispering through the past.’ Dreaming Northward combines superb storytelling and stellar writing—another winning novel from Craig Lancaster. Read this book!”--Cheryl Unruh, author of Gravedigger’s Daughter: Vignettes from a Small Kansas Town It's Tuesday, November 8, the first snow day of the season in Billings. Ordinarily, I'd have stayed in, but today I went out, and I'm glad I did. I delivered 40 fresh new copies of my debut novel, 600 Hours of Edward, to Skyview High School in Billings. That was the last of four deliveries I've made to Billings schools, for a total of 150 books. And the beauty of this is that I am merely the messenger, the delivery driver. These books—to replenish previous (and tattered) copies of the novel that have been in the schools for around a decade—landed where they did because of a community that answered the call. I asked for donations, enough to purchase those 150 books at a steep discount from the publisher, and my community funded the campaign inside of 12 hours. And when I say community, I mean Billings—so many people in Billings—but I also mean the larger community I'm privileged to call my own. Teachers in Virginia kicked in donations. A coworker in Ohio ponied up. Friends in Texas. People I didn't know until some cash landed. They did this because I asked for help in putting books in kids' hands. In this strange time in America, when we hear so much about taking books away from kids, these generous donors put books in front of them. It's a beautiful, radical act. As I so often do when the subject turns to the ties that bind us, I give thanks to teachers for doing what they do even as a significant slice of the population wants to fight them, deny them what they do well, castigate and smear them. This is shameful, yes, but it's also not new, and we can either let these angry, outsized voices have the floor, or we can meet them with a different set of values. English teachers where I live were instrumental in getting 600 Hours on the approved curriculum reading list for the high school level here in Billings. They saw a contemporary story of a neurodivergent character, one set in the town where their kids live, and they did the heavy lifting to ensure that they could teach that book in their classrooms. As I said in the Billings Gazette article about the first book delivery—thank you, Gazette—those teachers' dedication puts a responsibility on me that I'm only too happy to carry. “They’re the ones who pushed for this book because they know how to reach these kids. And if they’re the ones who are making sure of that, I’ll be the one making sure they have the books.” Damn right. A word about the asterisk up above.
Yeah, they're our kids. I sometimes get a lot of pushback on this—"they're not my kids"—and I really wish someone taking the opposite view would spend just a little bit of time thinking expansively about the idea and the implications of abandoning it. My trip through public education was, in many ways, a disaster. It was also one of the most important factors shaping who I became and how I see the world. Certainly, public education is not perfect, and certainly, reasonable people can disagree on how to shape it, fix it, whatever. But we cannot, must not lose our responsibilities to ourselves and each other and the generations coming up behind us. Public education is a compact, an agreement that we will provide our kids with a basic education, as a community, knowing full well that our investments in those kids now are really an investment in our own future as a society. If we lose that, I'm afraid we lose everything else. So, today, I finished delivering some books. Backed by my community. Hopeful that the fight can be won. Determined to keep fighting, either way.
Now that the video is up at YouTube, I'd be grateful if you checked out this interview I did with my wife, Elisa Lorello, to mark the release of her new novel, All of You. I've been hoping for many, many years that I'd have a chance to get to know her better, so lucky me!
We get into a lot of stuff in a wide-ranging conversation (we really don't have any other kind). I'm just so proud of her and of this book, which is getting some rave reviews.
Want a signed copy? You can get it at our favorite bookstore, This House of Books in Billings, Montana. Just note in the comment box that you want it signed, and Elisa will oblige you. |
About CraigCraig Lancaster is an author, an editor, a publication designer, a layabout, a largely frustrated Dallas Mavericks fan, an eater of breakfast, a dreamer of dreams, a husband, a brother, a son, an uncle. And most of all, a man who values a T-shirt. Archives
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