You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
Here’s something I’ve pondered in revising my big novel What’s Left:
Does the restaurant business essentially operate at the fringe of normal society? Or do weird characters naturally gravitate toward jobs there?
If you’ve ever worked in a commercial food operation, what’s you most telling impression?
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unorthodox
intense
original
integrative
playful
Her aunt Nita in my novel What’s Left, has an interesting insight on showing up for work before all the others. It doesn’t fit every job, but it did hers. And then I cut this from the final version of the book:
If you’re the first one in and the last one out, you can disappear in the middle of the day and your coworkers and bosses are none the wiser. They just assume you’re out on assignment.
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Not all jobs require you to punch-in or punch-out on some kind of clock. I’ve never had to work one of those, fortunately, although I’ve often had to fill out weekly time cards before being paid.
What I did find, though, was that even when I was putting in a lot of unpaid overtime (the joys of being low-tier management!), I could still feel the judgmental eyes behind my back.
Are you ever considered a slacker on your job? How does it feel? How do you respond?
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Cassia’s future father marries into a family that owns a popular restaurant. So that’s one additional connection for the members.
Considering his wife’s sister and three brothers, all with potential partners of their own, he’s not the only spouse thrown into the mix. And that’s before getting to those who want careers elsewhere.
What holds your extended family together? Or are you widely scattered?
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Among the fascinating voices who show up regularly in my WordPress Reader is Willow Croft, “Bringer of Nightmares and Storms,” a writer included in an anthology of “ladies of horror fiction.”
Not to worry, her blog is gentle and warm as her she surveys the alt-indie world of literature and related arts, and from her shelf at Goodreads, it’s hard to imagine a more adventurous or prodigious reader. Better yet, she generously shares her discoveries with the wider world, often through their own voices.
One of her ongoing features is “Five Things Friday,” a handful of deep questions posed to the day’s selected writer. I was so honored yesterday, and I’d love for you to hop over to Willow’s blog to see the results.
There’s nothing generic in her five inquiries. They’re tailored to the day’s guest, and she does her research. Somehow, she homed in on the essence of what I do while also making me think about it in a fresh light. One of her points indulges in special interest of hers – food – but even there, she makes it personal to her guest, as you’ll see.
I’ll apologize for the length of my answers, but the questions were multifaceted and stirred up much more than I could possibly include. She was free to cut or condense, of course, but didn’t.
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Willow herself is also a fellow poet, and that feeds into her compassionate curiosity.
Still, she’s surprisingly elusive in a digital age, even while being a comforting presence. Her blog, for instance, has no About page.
From the bits I’ve gathered, she grew up somewhere in the South, where she quickly resisted the enforced conformity, and recently relocated from New Mexico to Kansas, even though she dreams of someday settling in Scotland. Oh, yes, she also favors British spellings over American, as in “colour.”
I’m supposing she’s a water sign – Cancer, Pisces, or Scorpio. She claims to be middle-age, though I would have guessed a very wise late twenties to mid-thirties, based on her uninhibited tastes, and a cat lover.
A croft, by the way, is a small enclosed pasture, often with a cottage – and a resident known as a crofter. As for willows? How evocative – there’s water, after all, and resiliency.
A clue to her name and outlook may be this, from a piece she wrote for MookyChick: “Transform your backyard from a one-note turf lawn to a meadow-like garden that has a little something for every visitor; be it birds or flying insects and bugs. Avoid the use of leaf blowers, weed whackers, and pesticides in order to give nature the chance to tend to itself.”
Actually, that’s not a bad description for what you’ll see in her own work and life as well.
Would you agree that a close-knit extended family like the one in my novel What’s Left, is uncommon in today’s American society? Of my own five surviving first-cousins, only one remains in communication — a brief note every Christmas. None grew up in our city; two lived in the other corner of our state; the other four, at the time, in California.
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In a passage I cut from the final version:
It wasn’t quite like that when Baba shows up, but only because we kids aren’t yet on the scene. First, we need some marriages, like when Barney and Pia get a new generation rolling, followed by Tito and Yin and then my parents.
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And if Cassia’s uncle Dimitri or her aunt Nita had been adding to the gene pool, we’d have an even bigger slate of first-cousins to draw on. When it came to the novel, I had to limit things somewhere.
Have you ever been introduced to family members and found yourself asking yourself: Just who are these strangers? Have you enjoyed some of your kin at one point in your life but not at others? Do you ever feel some have been treated better than the rest?
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While still living in the Midwest, I came under the sway of the margins of the literary world more than the more influential institutions and best-selling or most critically acclaimed voices at its core.
In high school, I came across the weekly Village Voice tabloid amid the out-of-town newspapers at Willkie’s downtown and devoured its tales of sides of Manhattan (and the world) the established dailies ignored, mostly of a progressive slant. By college, it was augmented by New York Magazine, which originated under Clay Felkner as the Sunday supplement to the now defunct Herald Tribune; glossy Esquire, with its New Journalism stars; and Evergreen, alive with muckraking politics.
Concurrently, my advanced writing class my sophomore year opened my eyes to the importance of small literary reviews, some with institutional support and others fully independent, most of them published quarterly. Some were student run, others had professional staff; more likely they were a labor of love in the wee hours. Many of them were mimeographed and stapled, before photocopying took over. Now they’re mostly online.
I was already putting out a sporadic mimeo broadside, Dr. Samuel Johnson’s Rambler, on my commuter college campus, which also had a fine student-run review of its own, Nexus (35 cents!).
My next campus didn’t have such an active literary scene, especially of an experimental sort. As a student majoring in poly sci rather than English, though, I was able to sample some influential courses. Film history, for one, and Russian novels in translation in the Russian department, for another, and finally a current American novels class that examined Ishmael Reed, Tom Wolfe, Robert Coover, Thomas Pyncheon, and Ken Kesey. I was also reading a lot of Vonnegut and Hesse. On my return as a research associate in the mid-’70s, I became involved in a lively off-campus poetry circle led by Richard Pflum, Roger Pfingston, and David Wade, along with their annual Stoney Lonesome. The novelists I most often cite as influences were all active in this period.
My favorite literary periodicals were the Paris Review and Kayak, as well as the book publishers New Directions and Black Sparrow.
And then I got serious about poetry and submitting promiscuously. In all, I’ve had more than a thousand works accepted for publication by editors around the globe. Each acceptance encouraged more work in a particular direction, and sometimes comments on rejections (quite rare, I must say – most are mere forms) provided valuable advice. Some of the correspondence got quite lively. And yes, 20 rejections per submission was par for the course, as I’d been advised in that advanced writing class.
Trying to get a chapbook published, however, was more difficult. My biggest near-miss was with Copper Canyon in Washington state.
These days I can see my blogging as continuing in the small-press arena, especially at my Thistle Finch site, which is offering free PDF editions of my poetry.
Remember, feedback is always welcome for a writer, unless it’s purely caustic. Publishing in a void is the bigger struggle. I’d say the small-press scene is ultimately more personal. One reader can make all the difference.
One approach I employed may help readers keep track of the spreading number of family members.
In drafting my novel What’s Left, I envisioned each chapter as a module that could stand alone from the rest of the book. Think of it as a short story. That way, the number of characters in each chapter is more focused.
And while first names are usually repeated frequently in a Greek-American family, I limited this to just one great-grandmother and one descendant, and used a nickname for the elder one. Neat, eh?
Yes, the family members do show up in other modules and there is continuity over the whole, but at least you don’t have everyone in your face at once.
When you go to a social event and are introduced to many new people, are you able to remember their names and faces? Or do you go into a blur? How do you cope with this challenge?
Do we have to go back a whole century for a model of a greatly influential news columnist of philosophical bent?
One from Baltimore, no less.
Can’t imagine him writing from anywhere else.
Who are you reading these days?
Just what was I thinking? Was this supposed to be a philosophy class moment? A reflection on time versus space? Or fate versus free will? No wonder the paragraph failed to take root in my novel What’s Left.
History is filled with unique moments when something flashes up and takes hold. Or a singular intersection of trajectories appears in the universe of motion.
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The novel, by the way, has many of these situations, just as life itself does. We just didn’t need to get preachy.
I suppose this just might fit a story about baseball. Or think of football. The great play no fan will ever forget.
There are also those accidents, seemingly chance encounters, like the late-night crash that kills Cassia’s grandparents or the avalanche that claims her father. A few moments one way or the other, and her story would be much, much different.
I was more likely reflecting on those seconds where you have to make a decision one way or another. Say something. Do something. Yes or no. The beginning of a romance, for instance, once you’ve introduced yourself. Uttered the joke that could have as easily fallen flat.
Can you recall a significant moment in your life when something had to happen right then — or never at all? One with no second chances? Please share it! Be bold!
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Jnana's Red Barn 