Making Things Up is Decidedly Easier

Recently, my first piece of published non-fiction* entered the world, and non-fiction is a genre I adore, so I'm particularly grateful to see my writing in the field housed in a good home like The Rumpus.

I have to say, though: Oh, I find making things up so much easier.

When reading fiction, a reader can be bored or dislike something and put the work down, but, barring really egregious research fail, it's hard for the fiction writer to be wrong. The suspension of disbelief is embedded in the art of fiction; readers are more inclined to give the benefit of the doubt until given specific reason to do otherwise.

In non-fiction, which purports to represent reality at least to some measure, one can be wrong so much more easily, I think. I'm not talking specifically about facts, though that's certainly the most immediate and recognizable incorrect, but rather that the assumption is then, if non-fiction deals with reality, then the writer and the reader are approaching the subject matter from the same locus. That makes it easier to assess--and sometimes easier to engage in and identify with, and that's one of the great pleasures of non-fiction. Readers know reality; we're all in it. You know, theoretically.

I often worry that I fall more into that "theoretically" category than is probably healthy. I'm not sure I have the strongest grip on reality, in that fiction has always felt more real to me. I can categorically say I spend more time thinking about fiction(fictional worlds, people, and situations, well above and beyond the actual fiction I am or have been writing) than about my own experiences. I apply narrative to things that have no entrenched, absolute narrative (often in sports and music, where narrative may be suggested but not definitive). It's not a particularly conscious act on my part; it's simply how it's been.

I also question reality because it's become quite clear that people do not see the world in the same way. There are mounds of evidence culled from massively important social, religious, and emotional spheres to illustrate this, but the one that makes it stick is a memory from a graduate school fiction workshop. The professor brought to class an ashtray, a fairly conventional-looking, deep indigo blue ceramic ashtray. He asked the workshop to write about it, to describe it, and he gave us ten minutes. We wrote, we shared, and at the end of the exercise, he slapped the table.

"None of you got the color right. None of you. It's the exact shade of Minnesota Vikings purple. The exact shade of their helmets."

I tell you, reader, that ashtray could no more be called purple than the Vikings' helmets could be called blue.

But the moment drove home an important point: in that very talented writer and professor's eyes, the ashtray was not only capable of being classified as purple, but as a most pure and saturated purple. My father had a navy blue minivan for a while (so very definitively navy that it was described so on the from-the-dealer tag), and that van was called purple by many. As a lover of color-related words, I was (am) a little mental over this phenomenon, particularly with regard to my own dad, who can differentiate between a dozen dozen shades of brown to locate the particular hue of a whitetail deer in autumn.

But color must be as all things are: subjective, to a certain point. Linguistically, the differences in various languages for expressing the colors blue and green seem particularly fraught and complex. Left with time to percolate, this understanding that my eyes do not process color in the same way as someone else's (and colorblindness is a wholly different issue) has seeped into a lot of other areas. I wonder about the real version. I'm not often so full of hubris that I assume my own version is the most true (though it is really, really hard when I'm naming colors), which leads me to questioning everything.

At its most basic, it's lead to me being angry about situations that necessitate wearing sunglasses because sunglasses distort and cool and shade (which is their function, yes, but I dislike it--I want the "most real" version, eye fatigue and all). At its most ridiculous, it leads me to wondering whether I'm the only one seeing the traffic signal turn green. What if it's still actually red? After a pretty terrifying bit of driving outside of Flagstaff as I returned from Arizona, it had me actually considering whether I might have already died. My mind turned the morning into a film cliche: the ghost that doesn't know it's dead. As I crept along in four inches of wet, heavy snow, looking at other cars that had slid from the road, spinning circles into the median, and holding my breath every time a tractor trailer passed me because the slush-spray threw an impenetrable white blindness over the whole car, I was really starting to consider it possible. Or inevitable.

By the time I emerged from the worst of the snow, I decided that at least my half-baked grip on reality was entertaining if I was going to spend the next eighteen hours in the car, alone. I am never bored.

The drive ended well enough (and late/early enough), and despite the very concrete physical evidence of it all (like how much it hurt and lessened yet other hurts when I peeled myself from the driver's seat for the last time), it still didn't feel like what must be someone else's version of real. What does a haze of snowflakes look like at three in the morning? The weather became a wholly different thing when I turned on my high beams. In lower light, in the final hundred miles, one snowflake hit the windshield once in a while, not even enough to make me turn the wipers on. In brighter--which I used whenever I could because my eyes staged pronghorn ready to spring at every mile marker--it looked like heading into warp space, a thousand thousand white speckles approaching from the deep because the storm was coming from the west to the east, and I was driving toward it. The light caught each flake, turning it into one of those small stretched lights, like this was the U.S.S. Enterprise. Back to low-beams? Six white dots in lazy distance, an afterthought. Again to high? A deluge of powder.

But I didn't see a single pronghorn--in fact, not a single creature in the trip--because wild things are smart enough to hunker down in the face of bad weather. They did their moving before the wind changed. Ungulates, too, are mostly crepuscular, not nocturnal, and I know that. And yet, there they were, in the reflector-glint at the roadside, eyes in every discarded aluminum can. Both caution and exhaustion create these phantoms, which revealed their mile-marker or litter-based nature as I passed, but I want to know, empirically, which is the more real: the way my mind did make those shapes and the way I saw that heavy slanting snow; or the concrete knowledge that there were no pronghorn beside the road?

I know that there are principles of velocity that give reason to the snow's appearance. I know there are neurochemical explanations for the imagined animals. I'm asking the wrong question in wanting one or the other, and perhaps that's what non-fiction does: it lets the writer and the reader contemplate that intersection. It's still an anxious place, though, for me as a writer. When I write fiction, I know what constitutes that imagined real. It is finite and it is absolute because it's mine. If I've done my job at the sentence level, there isn't that same intersection of maybe blue, maybe purple. If it is deep indigo blue, it is that. The same holds true at the sentence level in non-fiction, too, of course; the writer still has to choose the words carefully to arrive at whatever version of true or correct or real is being represented. But in fiction, I am certain of that version. Fiction is one of the few things in this world about which I am certain.

When I walked to my front door that night, at three-thirty in the morning, all I can say is that it was snowing hard, and still there was no trace of it on the ground.




* I'm going to use non-fiction instead of creative non-fiction in this, though I have to say that I really mean the same thing by both terms as I apply it to my own work: writing grounded in truth. Essay--but essay, in my mind, connotes more breadth, depth, and length than my own pieces I'm referring to here, none of which are over two thousand words. Creative non-fiction--but that connotes a less pre-determined course in the actual act of writing, and the pieces I've linked here were done with quite concrete goals and final purposes in mind. So...wibbly-wobbly lingo-bingo writey-blighty stuff.

goodnight, spring break

Sundown at Salt River Fields at Talking Stick, Scottsdale, AZ

It's tipping past bedtime on Sunday night, and I've accomplished what I set out to do this spring break: I finished the revision of my novel. Admittedly, it took until the end of tonight instead of the end of my week in Arizona, but it's done. All 673 pages of it. Now I enter the really difficult part: sending it out into the world.

More importantly, I can now move on to the other shorter writing projects I have simmering.

The week I spent in the greater Phoenix area was nothing short of magical. Look for odds and ends of that sort of thing in the not-so-distant future.

Arizona Calling

It's been a long two days of driving (though it was also good driving: 191 South and 17 South were, on the whole, everything I ask for in a highway). Have a little photo collage of things I saw, offered with surprisingly little commentary. (I saw a great many more things, but I did not take pictures of everything, because, you know, driving.)

Dam at the base of Flaming Gorge, UT

Cameron, AZ

Another view of Cameron, AZ (near the South Rim of the Grand Canyon)

Scottsdale, I consider this to be showing off.

I like this view, too. The little hand-held tape recorder definitely wins MVP for the trip, though the wee blue speakerlet will certainly get a lot of love in the post-game interviews, as well.

Hunting Spring: The Writer Goes South

I am going to Arizona in seven days. During the semester spring break, I am, for the first time since my middle year of undergraduate (which was in 2002), going to have a proper spring break in which I do "spring break things."  I understand that most of the world does not get any version of spring break, let alone a proper spring break, and I am grateful for any break at all, spring or otherwise. But I spent last spring break coming home from AWP and then having the worst flu experience of my life (really for ten full days). Generally, "spring break" means one or several simultaneous variants: grade like a lunatic; go to AWP and run around feeling exhilarated or abjectly miserable (with truly no middle ground); complete grant applications; visit family; feel guilty about not visiting family. Spring break has been part of my life for the last thirteen years. With any luck, it will continue to be so. But spring breaks have never really meant break, and spring breaks have certainly never meant writing. 

I aim to change that, at least for this year. I am doing so by doing a lot of things I've never done before.

1. I will be making a two-thousand mile round-trip solo. I've done a lot of long road-trips in my life, but never with just me for company. ...I should probably add some new tunes to my collection before I go and put fresh batteries in my hand-held tape recorder. (Taking actual notes while driving is a poor choice.)

1a. If you have strong opinions about music I should be listening to, recommend me stuff in the comments. I will have a long time to test-drive a lot of tunes.

2. I will be creating a writing retreat for myself for the first time. Over the summer, most days were "writing retreats" for me, at least in the sense that I had the house to myself for the bulk of the day, but being at home is never a place I can really isolate myself. There's too much familiar, too much waiting. Too many feelings of You should be doing ___.

3. I will be finishing my revision. Come hell or high water, this is the heart of my trip.

4. I will be going to MLB's Spring Training in the west. I've never been to Spring Training (as I have never lived closer than a thousand miles to it, but apparently the distance matters not this year). I've got plans for a handful of Cactus League games, and I'm staying within walking distance of two different stadiums. I will hopefully get to see Hunter Pence. Twice.

5. I have non-fiction writing assignments for myself, as related to this event. The novel revision comes first, but I've got some ideas, so much so that they've become assignments in the journalistic sense. I'm not thinking so much of straight reportage or anything, but I very, very seldom know what I'm going to write before I start it. Right now, I have some actual plans. I'm interested to see what happens with these, in an experimental sense. Am I even capable of following an idea formulated in advance? How long will it take before everything takes the unexpected left at Albuquerque?

6. I will watch ice hockey in the desert. The Ducks come to Phoenix, and I'll get to see a proper handful of former Penguins. (I miss Steve Sullivan. There, I said it.) Is it tacky to wear Penguins' gear to a Coyotes/Ducks game in support of former Penguins...even if said Penguins' gear is not specific to said former Penguins? Am I a douche for showing up in an Orpik jersey when Ray Shero decided the Penguins did not need now-Duck Ben Lovejoy's services on defense? Am I over-thinking this?

6a. After consulting my brother, he doesn't think the other four people at the arena will care. I can just move to sit in a different section.

To get there, though, I have to get through another full week of the regular responsibilities. It's going to be a busy week, for a number of reasons, some of which I may write about at some point.

what comes after the draft?

On December 20, I finished the first draft of the novel I've been working on since June. The euphoria of it lasted for about as long as it took to print a copy, stack the pages evenly, and bind it with yarn because it was too large to fit in any manuscript box that I had. I put it in the mail to Laura, e-mailed it to a few more readerfriends, and that was it.

We should bind more piles of paper with string. It's a theory.

The draft was done, and it was time to start the mellowing process before revision. Most writers will say they need a cooling off period before doing a thorough revision, some emotional and intellectual distance, and I generally agree with that. It's probably wise (to try) to fall a little out of love so I can look dispassionately at the narrative and characters before I make the hard decisions.

It was good to get the draft done. I got on a plane to visit family for the holidays less than thirty-six hours after I finished. The trip was part of the imperative to complete the book: if it wasn't out of my hands, it would have been in my hands through that whole trip, to the exclusion of the people I flew two thousand miles to see. I tried to leave it all behind, actually, but couldn't. I put a complete printed copy in my carry-on. I read my own draft on the plane, in airports, and even in the rare stray moments between visiting mania. I called it line-editing, and that wasn't a complete lie. At my parents' house, I was an insufferable prat who dropped the whole brick of it in front of my brother, onto the floor, so he could hear it. The physical shape and heft are things that everyone gets, even if talking about the weight of a novel means something quite different on the inside of this writer.

I have (mostly) stopped carrying it around. I have feedback from each of my readers, and as of the end of January, I've begun the actual process of revising. I even rearranged my desk to accommodate that.

Drafts to the left of G, drafts to the right, but he's stuck in the middle with Blues (versus Kings, which totally didn't fit into the lyric I was going for).

But between late December and late January, without the anchor of working on the novel, I nearly flew to pieces. I don't know what actual mania feels like, but maybe it was like this. I picked up knitting again for the first time in nearly a year. I didn't just pick it up--I tore back fifteen hours of knitting and started over, eclipsing my previous ending point in half the time. I spun several hundred yards of laceweight yarn. I completely disassembled my spinning wheel, re-treated all of the wooden pieces, and put it back together again. I've had it for almost six years and have never done that. I spun some more afterward. I made a lot of bread. I tried new recipes. I went to the gym. I reorganized my spice cupboard, cleaned the oven, listened to minor league hockey games, and tried to teach myself Russian. I agonized over whether to join a fantasy hockey league and decided I was too emotionally compromised by hockey to add an additional dimension to that. I applied to more residencies, I wrote some pieces of essays, I started working on the next novel in the queue. I cleaned all of my fountain pens and turned to writing everything long-hand for a while. I bought a brush pen and tried to learn to use it. I found an opportunity to teach in Romania for two weeks this summer. I prepped a brand new class I'd never taught before. I planned a road-trip and a vacation.

And I went back to the manuscript, over and over. I couldn't help myself. No matter what else I tried to put in those hours, there was no staying away. I looked at the first set of comments I'd gotten and made notes, questions to ask my other readers. I cheated and started fixing details and continuity blips; I rewrote the first chapter entirely because I'd decided to do that anyway. I spent the week after New Year's with a friend (who was in the process of reading the draft) and explaining to her what the characters thought of the music we listened to, the food we ate, the scenery.

There was, in sum, no clean break, and I couldn't figure out how to actually take time off. The only way I can conceive of getting that real distance, the editorial coolness and indifference that other people talk about, is infidelity. I will need to fall faster and harder in love with the next thing, and it isn't happening now. I don't want it to, either: the revising is getting done. In the past, I've gotten that distance because familiarity bred enough contempt that I didn't want to look at the piece anymore. Then I came back to it, weeks or months or even years later, when it had ceased being mine in any significant way. The contempt for this project hasn't come, and the revision is getting done because the trail is still fresh, still compels me to follow. The metaphor has gone from romance to the hunt. They are, of course, the same thing: both about blood, which is the vehicle for desire.

Annie Dillard writes, in the first chapter of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,

Certain Indians used to carve long grooves along the wooden shafts of their arrows. They called the grooves “lightning marks,” because they resembled the curved fissure lightning slices down the trunks of trees. The function of lightning marks is this: if the arrow fails to kill the game, blood from a deep wound will channel along the lightning mark, streak down the arrow shaft, and spatter to the ground, laying a trail dripped on broad-leaves, on stones, that the barefoot and trembling archer can follow into whatever deep or rare wilderness it leads. I am the arrow shaft, carved along my length by unexpected lights and gashes from the very sky, and this book is the straying trail of blood. (13)

I'm following the blood on this book because the trail is still fresh, and it feels like an open wound in that I'm always conscious of it, like something's carved open and dripping red if I'm not working on it. That's new for me.

Gregory Orr, a lyric poet, and John Gardner, of Grendel and The Art of Fiction fame, talk about writing as coming from a wound, as trying to stitch together what will never heal. Both of these writers have some concrete experience with an extreme version of this--Orr shot and killed his brother in a hunting accident, and Gardner's brother was killed in a farming accident while Gardner was driving the tractor. I understand that every word may pull toward those kinds of moments because how can they not? But I don't think the wound is always tragic. I don't think the wound is always even real, insofar as to mean an event or a happening, but I cannot help but think of writing--any writing--as something in the blood or of it, even the raw flesh sting of a hangnail. Maybe that's the crux of it, really: it doesn't have to bare anything to the bone in order to exist.

I have a triangle of broken skin at the edge of my left thumbnail. It's not even a proper hangnail. It scabs flat and thin and my idle worrying at it makes it bleed without even hurting. The blood follows the line of the nail, pools under the short white rim of keratin before I can get a Band-aid. It's been this way for long enough that I can't picture this hand without it. Certainly there was a time, and not so long ago, but I don't remember it. The feeling, the vague itch, presents itself as forever. So it is with this book and revision. I can show you on a calendar when it became a part of my life--June 4, 2012--but it feels like always because imagining before, where there must have been some empty space that has become so filled, is too dire to contemplate. And for the three or so weeks that I tried, really tried, to make it not be present, there was a small, raw place on my thumb, my brain, my heart, my left ankle, just above the hard jointed knobs.

I'm still working on that knitting, but I haven't cooked much of anything since the Superbowl.

The pattern is Catkin by Carina Spencer. It's a cracking brilliant design.

My phone has two Romanian flashcard apps on it, but I haven't looked at them in a while. My Russian dictionary is beside my desk, but it's only there for the book. It's even been a little over a week that I've been to the gym, but I'll tip the halfway point on revising tonight. There's still a red seam on my left thumb, but both hands have been too busy to worry it.
 

The Next Big Thing: I'm Doing It Wrong

Two months ago, Olivia Chadha, a friend and former graduate school colleague whose lovely novel, The Balance of Fragile Things, was published in 2012 by Ashland Creek Press, sent me a set of really excellent writerly questions. These questions are part of a forward-rolling blog series called The Next Big Thing (and the nature of it is to pass it forward, and so if these questions would help you, reader, please take them, please use them, please post), and Olivia was awesome to pass them to me.

What is the working title of your book?

Where did the idea come from for the book?

What genre does your book fall under?

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

Who or What inspired you to write this book?

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

The problem is this: I can't answer them. 

I mean, of course, I could. These are all things that I've thought about before (though the "who would you cast?" question is a rabbit-hole that I could fall down forever and still not get it quite right). One of the reasons that I have (again) dropped off the face of the blogging-earth is the completion of the first draft of the novel I've been vaguely alluding to since June. I have a draft. I have a whole, complete project and it's the first time since I finished my dissertation. And I have never been happier with a manuscript. (Don't let that fool you; the revisions will be vast, of course, but I'm already feeling like I know what those revisions are, which is a wholly new experience as a writer.) But I look at these questions and all I can hear is jinx. 

I've written before about being, on the whole, unable or unwilling to discuss the work in progress. That's true and it isn't. In one way or another, this book is the only thing that I've spoken about in six months because even when I'm not talking about it, I am. In the back of my mind, every conversation arrives there. (I spend considerable time hoping no one notices that, too.) But there are probably only two people who've heard real details throughout the process, and now the process is done (at least draft one). Now, there are six people who have or have had the manuscript in-hand, to help me figure out the algebra of revision. I'm glad to be in this space. 

But I still can't talk about it, not in this specific, useful way. It still feels too soon (and I'd be lying if I said there wasn't a little writerly paranoia underwriting it all--don't give away too much, lest someone else take the idea and fun with it, better, faster, farther, nevermind that I also believe, truly and firmly, that there are no new ideas, only new ways of approaching them, and all of those ways are valuable. I am aware that this is a vast hypocrisy). I do think that these questions are phenomenal for someone whose book has just come out or whose book is under contract or for someone who is far more brave and confident about the publication process. 

Part of me, of course, is convinced that my reticence here is base cowardice. Part of me thinks it's pragmatism. I'm thinking that it's some of both and a bit of neither. What I am certain of is that these are important questions to be able to answer, particularly in the context of seeking publication for one's work. And so I am answering them, just not here. I hope, in days and months to come, to be able to answer them properly, clearly, and without the sense that I am somehow sabotaging myself.

Blog post the next: What do I do after the draft? (More about writing than Fantasy Hockey, but that's sure to factor in.)

now is the only answer

“One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better.” 

~Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

Yes, Dillard again, and a Dillard quote that is one of those things that I know, that I have known since the first time I read The Writing Life, something that has been comfortingly true since that class at Lycoming College. That doesn't mean that I don't forget it sometimes, and I had one of those moments tonight, working on the novel.

I've come to that heady and dizzying place with the manuscript: the end is in sight. How that breaks down in any kind of temporal way, I certainly can't say, but I can say that I can hear it now, and it's not an echo. I'm doing a pass through from the beginning of it right now, ironing out the wrinkles for the elements it has taken me all of these pages to properly understand, to finish the scenes that I skipped because I had no idea what was really happening in them or I didn't feel like writing them just then (sometimes, I don't want to deal with conversation, in person or in print; some days, there is no stomaching a second more of interiority, mine or a character's) and onwards was always better than grinding hours of stalemate. I need to see what may now need to flex and change.

Among those points of flex and change was a scene percolating in my mind, one that's been saying you need me while I kept saying, "No, not yet. Not yet. Surely not yet." And then I hit this flat spot in my read-through, about forty percent of the way through, a plateau that extended on into the distance because it was also one of those unfinished places. Unfinished because it wasn't going anywhere, and I didn't want to write it because it wasn't going anywhere and I didn't know what direction even to point. 

Tonight, a fair bit of it got pointed directly at the book's scrap heap: cut and paste, right out of the proper living text and right into file that's a kind of dry dock for me. I don't actually delete very much. I wrote the sentences. Yes, sometimes they are truly trash, but more often, they're the back of my brain telling me something I'm not ready to hear yet. I'll come back to it. 

I can't tell you how useful a scrap heap or graveyard file is. It's the thing that lets me cut with impunity (yes, paring away is ninety percent of my editing process and no one at all is surprised). It's the thing that gives me the correct spaces to see the work, too: if I can't see past one of these dead zones, I tear it out. Maybe I don't need it at all. If I can't understand what that pile of words is doing because there's too much gravity pulling at the befores and afters, I put it on blank pages in the scrap heap, read it alone. No matter what, that text is not lost. I can (and do) go back to that detritus later, when I am searching for something that feels familiar, something that feels caught on the tip of the tongue (or the fingers). Chances are, I already wrote something of it. I just put it in the wrong place. 

That may be the best lesson I've learned while working on this book: trusting my own process. Not worrying forward or backward, but feeling reasonably confident that the pieces I need would reveal themselves in time. It's been working. (The scrap heap is good insurance. Trust, but also keep records.)

But now comes the point in the process when everything must be in the present. If I want to finish, I am past the point of "deal with it later." 

(I do want to finish.)

And tonight, it became incredibly clear: to hell with not yet. Now is the only answer. Put in the scene I've been saving. 

In the process, too, I had to ask why I was holding it back, and the only answer to that is that I wasn't sure what it would lead to, wasn't sure where else it could go. I was thinking of the side-to-side movement, of shifting, like eyes, like my narrator rocking foot to foot when the only thing to do is to climb. I have given her a new hill.

Tomorrow, I trust that something else will arise after. She'll have new places to put her feet.

That would be suspiciously like joy in Mudville

What would be suspiciously like joy in Mudville, you ask? Professional ice hockey coming to Casper. Right now, it is frustratingly all uncertain, but there's a conversation happening. A conversation that could bring CHL hockey to Casper. 

The biggest challenges seem to be financial, of course, and I'm surprised that the theoretical plan would be to modify the Casper Events Center (installing ice and a Jumbotron, etc.), but it has held the Wyoming Cavalry indoor football, the CNFR, many state sports tournaments--it would certainly hold a fairly impressive crowd. It's also got locker room facilities, where glamorous things happen, like Casper College faculty members holding their annual "can anyone actually arrange their academic hood the correct way?" contest for commencement. (Pro tip: I don't think there is a correct way. I think the academic hood is just a cruel joke played on folks in academe in perpetuity. It's slightly below "good luck ever simply reading a book again" in sinisterness.)

I'm not just grasping at straws here in the absence of the NHL with my incredibly premature enthusiasm. I'm not not in panicked desperation for my Penguins, but I am applying copious amounts of AHL and KHL hockey to my chafed soul. It's something. I have emergency hockey treatments already scheduled over winter break (WBS Penguins vs. Hershey Bears, home and away, back to back days, oh yes). 

But now that I've had a good taste of real minor league sports, living here in Casper and getting kind of attached to the awkward growing period of things like Rookie ball and then the Mountain Collegiate Baseball League (not technically professional minor leagues, but still a developmental league), I'm more than a little in love. I've never been to a CHL game, nor even an ECHL game (because I've spent most of my life in the East) because I've always lived closer to AHL clubs. In this world of hypothetical wishing, I don't know what to expect. I have to admit I filter these things by baseball terminology--it seems the equivalent of AA baseball. I don't know what that looks like in hockey. I can't imagine what it will look like in Casper, with a team that, according to the article, will likely be a transplant from Texas. (I say good. I say, Let us rescue you. There is winter here. This is a place friendly to ice.) One of the teams in that league currently in Texas is unaffiliated, and my completely uneducated gut instinct says that would be the team that moves. The Allen Americans are a Dallas Stars affiliate, but the Fort Worth Brahmas are unattached (unattached officially, it seems, but there are a number of current roster players that have come up through the Sabres system, including Riley Boychuk and Shawn Szydlowski).

Wyoming is all about cattle. Come to us, Brahmas. (Or, if I am wrong, I'm cool with the Allen Americans. People wave flags here really well.)

(Also, Mario, maybe the Penguins would like a CHL affiliate, since we're sharing Wheeling with the Canadiens?)

Hockey-related talk this fall has been an exercise in not getting my hopes up. As the linked article above explains, it's far from a done deal, too. Details are incredibly sketchy, vague, fraught. What that should mean is that it's easy to push off to the side for a while. I'll learn the decision when everyone else does (and if it's going to happen, the decision will come soon, it seems, unlike in the actual NHL where nothing is happening soon). 

But all this has done is give me framework in which my imagination is already hiring a Zamboni driver. I'm already watching next year's draft, watching to see who might end up here. I don't need much on which to build wild flights of fancy, particularly not with hockey (particularly not with anything--don't let me fool you into thinking I have only a few categories of imaginative excess). 

I'm hanging my hat and my heart on this. 

Forth Worth and Allen, two of the possible hypothetical future Casper teams, are in a shootout right now, actually. 3-3 as of 9:20, MST, on 10/26. Allen wins, 4-3, on a goal by D-man Brett Skinner, a 2002 draft pick by the Canucks. He's got a bit of a journeyman's career, having started as a pro in 2005 and, after a bit of shuttling about that did include some games with the Islanders, having played for Amur Khabarovsk in 2010-2011. 

Now that I'm waist-deep in trying to wade the KHL waters (complicated most by time zones, actually, because it's hard to follow games when my students are shuffling yawning into their first class of the day), and I now think I get the enormity (and isolation and what must be a constant feeling of jetlag) of playing in Khabarovsk, I want that guy in my city, playing hockey. 

That's not even likely. Skinner's on a one-year deal with Allen, and if this season goes well for him, his goal is not going to be staying in the CHL. That isn't how the system works. The system works by moving up, moving on, and any (remember: hypothetical still, Holly) hockey that would take place in Casper wouldn't happen until 2013. 

So the right thing to do is to say, no, Brett Skinner, I don't want to see you here next year. Based on exactly six minutes of watching a text box update with the successes and failures of the shootout, I want you to have a good season. Brett Skinner, defenseman with a solid shot, I want you somewhere better next season. And then I want to watch the player who takes your place, and hope I don't see him the year after that, either.

"Ae fond kiss, and then we sever": When is a story done?

It's cold here in Casper. I have hot cider. It seemed correct to start with a Robert Burns line, then. But the Burns line is purposeful in that I have reached what I consider to be a rare thing: the place of being finished with a story.

I have many times had stories be finished with me before I was finished with them (the ones that never quite went anywhere, the fragments in computer folders and notebooks where the relationship ended on a note of mutual ambivalence), and there are many stories that aren't quite there yet, something shoe still waiting to drop (as soon as I find the damn shoe--maybe waiting for the shoe to be thrown). There are the stories, too, that are only pretending to be stories, that are really just novels waiting to leap. To them, I crack my whip and brandish my chair: back! back! (Or at least admonish them to queue up in an orderly fashion.)

But sometimes, the piece and I have said all we have to say to each other, and the story goes out into the wide world and finds its right home, and once it's there, there's no reason for me to meddle with it. I'm speaking mostly of publication, which has traditionally been the marker of done (not always, of course, but oftener than not). I've had the good fortune of placing a short story that I wrote a eight years ago (it doesn't feel like that long ago) in Stymie Magazine, and so now I can talk about writing with actual concrete referents, rather than vague hand-waving at the book-in-progress.

So this is putting "Middle Infield" to rest. Walking away. Saying a fond farewell.

There is a particular pleasure in finding a journal for a story that feels right for it, and because of the specificity of this story's major pieces--baseball, queerness, teenaged characters--it was not an easy fit. Any one of those things seems to have a number of markets, but the Venn diagrams seldom overlap. And so I am especially pleased to have it homed in Stymie, where so many facets of sport (and a lot of various and interesting hybridities) are showcased.

I wrote this story in one of my MA program workshops, and I owe, of course, a great deal to a small group of excellent workshop colleagues that I had there. I remember, though, that even in its shitty first draft, it was the first short story that I'd written as a short story, all self-contained, with no lingering desires to become a novel, that I was even remotely happy with. Because I hadn't written it as the obligatory workshop submission (because workshopping novel chapters in a short story workshop is seldom productive)--I'd written the story on its own terms, and it went quickly because so much of it was so dear to me. False and fictional and all of the things I stole from the world of the real had been dragged through algae and sunflower seed shells by the end, but dear to me still.

I was in Ohio at the time. Most people don't think of Ohio as markedly different from central Pennsylvania (or any of the other mid-Atlantic states), but it was the furthest I'd been from home in the long term, in a way that was truly on my own. Campus housing, during my BA, even if I seldom went home, certainly didn't count. As a TA in graduate school, I had a job, a regular paycheck, the first semblance of a functional adult life. Gone were the thousand activities and club meetings of yesterdegree--now onto serious academic study. Now into an actual college town, which is all that town was: bars (a perilous lot of bars), great music, independent restaurants, and twenty thousand twenty-somethings. Nothing at all like my no-horse childhood home or my unfriendly, working-class city and its idyllic campus island that we seldom left.

I think now that some of this story was born of homesickness. Maybe a way to pay homage to where I'd come from because everyone else I knew seemed to be from a much more recognizable version of somewhere. Maybe a way to hold up small things I loved about a place where I no longer fit myself. No matter the reason, and I didn't know it then, but Cal and Brendan and the smaller details of their lives were ways of reaching out to the place that I'd left. That's completely contradictory in that it is all firmly fiction--it's set in upstate New York, even, years before I lived there or ever knew that I would--but the characters play out on the landscapes of memory.

A list:

1. The snapping turtle was real. My brother and a friend of his fished them out of a farm pond, though never so big. I remember them showing me the hook they used for it, three inches long and the wire of it too stiff to bend. They did bait it with a raw chicken wing. Stevie's mother did not make soup from the turtles they caught. The turtles did eat ducklings. But I don't know how they killed them after catching them. 


2. I harbor no ill will toward turtles, snapping or otherwise. In a visiting writer's talk while I was in Ohio, though, Clint McCown read from his novel, War Memorials, in which a lizard meets a dire end via a window sash, if I remember correctly. I remember feeling more guilty about killing off that snapping turtle in the story than I did for any number of other injustices I'd committed against characters. I do not remember if McCown felt similar remorse. I know the question came up.


3. The pond Cal and Brendan stand beside is not in upstate New York. It is in my parents' neighbor's pasture, and the pond is roughly the size of a regulation ice hockey rink. It was fed by a small stream, though, and it never froze hard enough to skate on it. Or we never knew how deep it really was and my parents said no to our desire to skate on it. Both are true. It did house a number of fish, though, and we caught bluegills and sunnies there, on small, flimsy rods. There were turtles, snappers in that pond (as in so many ponds where I grew up), and they would have cut our four-pound test with no effort if we'd fished with any bait that tempted them.


4. Cal's grandparents' basement belongs to my friend Bill, who was also my middle school boyfriend. Its ceilings were too low for Bill, who was already nearly six feet tall in those gangly years. In high school, a whole knot of us hung out there, stooped over the small pool and air hockey tables, and we didn't drink, even though we knew we could have. We played terrible nineties music and there was often a strobe light on because why not. There was a fat plastic barrel of pretzel sticks. One of my grandfathers still keeps them beside his chair. The basement had its own bathroom, too, one where the concrete block hadn't even been painted. It was always cold. The cold was a good excuse, and it often lead to some pair of people making out on the couch. 


5. Ted Williams hitting walnuts with a broomstick may be apocryphal. I feel like I remember my dad telling me about it. It feels true. That's what matters.


6. Regarding a tiny reference buried in a paragraph--a guy who went to my high school, Dominic Rich, who played baseball with my brother--did rip it up playing for Auburn. The Blue Jays drafted him in the second round in 2000. The whole valley was kind of gutted, I think, when he didn't make it past AA ball. (My hometown was blessed with excellent baseball players while my three-years-older brother was in high school. I wouldn't love the sport the way I do if I hadn't been raised on such a beautiful version of it.)


7. The high school I imagine here is my own. Rural. Conservative. Full of people who would not let neighbors go hungry or leave anyone to change a flat tire on one's own. Full of the kind of silence, though, too, that lets Brendan say, of the possibility of queer athletes (and really, for his context, queer anyone, queer him, queer them), "No one talks about it." The silence that makes Cal continue with the affirmation that what cannot be said cannot be done. Queerness is not an option. 

This is the place where I want to say goodbye to this story. It ends with some hope because I believe in hope and I am an optimist. But this story was written years before the You Can Play Project, most of a decade before, and it was written in the fullest sense of Brendan's wishful thinking. (I am reminded of Oscar Wilde and Miss Prism's famous line: "The good end happily and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means." Because Oscar Wilde didn't have the luxury of that wishful thinking.) I say goodbye to this story on Spirit Day, in hopes that Brendan and Cal, wherever they are, whatever they are doing, together or alone (because characters, in my mind, keep moving forward in their worlds, aren't stuck where the last sentence leaves them--they have trajectories and there is no friction great enough to bring story to a complete halt), are well and happy and no longer in a place where they feel that hard weight of silence.

I have more hope still for the real LGBT youth because of the many organizations and individuals who are speaking out, who are acting, who are changing this landscape of silence. 

Relegateds, Mount Up

I'll start this with a confession that Warren G's Regulate...G Funk Era was definitely the first album my parents banned me from listening to. That didn't happen very often, as my parents didn't listen to enough music to know what we were listening to (they objected also to Nirvana's In Utero, but only because of the album art, not because they had any idea what a Nirvana was). The only way my brother and I got busted while listening to our ridiculous Columbia House CD club haul was if the person managing the stereo forgot to turn down the super profanity-laden passages while the other person booked it through Super Mario World. We were good at remembering on The Offspring's "Bad Habit," but once in a while, there was a lapse in concentration, and we got chewed out, and the album disappeared.

At that stage in my life (I was probably eleven?), it didn't matter much. We had no culture built around any of that music, and where we grew up, there wasn't much of any culture around music at all. And so those lost albums drifted out of  consciousness, and later, when we'd reached some sort of arbitrary "old enough" point, they slipped back into the stack, rotated back up into play now and again. Sometimes it was finding an old friend again. Sometimes it was thinking I'd have been better off with the sole Swedish fish I could have gotten instead of that CD with the one cent (plus shipping and handling). Whatever it was, the chemistry, the might-have-been was interrupted.

This post is not about music. It is about interrupted chemistry.

Most particularly, it is about the system of relegation in English football (and other sports/sports-governing bodies around the world). As an American who didn't come into following football (as I will call it because soccer is American and I still don't really follow American soccer beyond the US national teams) until the age of twenty-one, the system really staggered me. The quick explanation is that English professional football is divided into tiers. At the top, you have the English Premier League (EPL), which is famously populated currently by Manchesters United and City, Arsenal, and Chelsea, and sixteen other teams. The next tier, the Championship (not to be confused with the Champions League, which features teams from all over Europe who've qualified for that annual set of games that doesn't function exactly like a tournament but not exactly like regular season play, either), has had recent mainstays among its twenty-four teams like Watford, Middlesbrough, and Nottingham Forest. The third tier is called League One, and there is League Two below it, and both of those have twenty-four teams, too[1]. The top three teams in each division get promoted to the next-highest division (unless they're in the EPL, in which case, bully for them, they're at the top of the league, and lately, they're likely playing for one side of Manchester or another, so piss off). The bottom three teams are relegated to the next-lowest division. There is a playoff for the third promotion spot. The top two go automatically, and then 3rd through 6th place do a short tourney for that coveted last spot. Them's the breaks.

Notice that I haven't named teams from League One and League Two. I haven't named representatives because, up until last season, I hadn't spared a thought for those tiers at all. They did not apply to me, a Sheffield United fan since 2003.

How I became a Sheffield United fan is another story. Let's dwell in the now. What is the now for Sheffield United? A strange and sad place. They're in their second straight year of being in League One after not having dropped so low since the eighties, and the drop brings with it more than just damaged pride. There are costs, quite tangible financial costs, as unsuccessful teams do not command great coverage deals, sponsorships (particularly in a league where even the jerseys are sponsored), and ticket sales. The same woes follow all sports, and it is quite difficult for small market and/or struggling teams to turn it around. Those are one set of issues in a system where at least the team's level of play stays the same; there are constants, and where there are constants, there's some kind of hope, even if the hope is that finishing dead last means a good crack at the best draft picks.

The necessary purse-tightening leads to cuts, generally of those players with higher salaries, often veterans. There are no players on the team that I first loved that are still playing for Sheffield United. The last from my early days as a fan--Nick Montgomery, who'd always been a part of that team, and Stephen Quinn, who'd been one of my favorites in the last few years--have moved on to other clubs. Montgomery is actually playing for a Blades-affiliated Australian side, and Quinny, I hope, will have better chances at Hull City. I realize that football careers are not as long as they are in baseball, and expecting a lot of continuity over almost a decade is silly, but there hasn't even been continuity at the top. Since Neil Warnock left after the not-so-successful one-year stint in the Premiership[2], the Blades have had five managers. It's hard for any team to get anything productive done like that, and, as a baseball fan, I am well aware that even a very good manager who has one less-than-ideal season can lose the job entirely, too[3]. And if a team is bleeding money through many wounds--the lack of on-field success included--the loss of personnel, in players who want greener pitches and managers who can't get it done, for whatever reason, is inevitable.

But Sheffield United hasn't dealt with that kind of player loss alone, though there are parts of me--the narrative-mad, intangibles-loving[4] kind of fan--that thinks these pieces are connected. The pieces I'm talking about are character-related, and probably the biggest (unfortunately) Sheffield United story of last year was Ched Evans' arrest--and eventual incarceration--for rape. I'm not at all sorry to see him go. If he'd been found guilty but still managed to continue playing on some sort of loophole, it might have been the end of my love for this team. Or I'd do what I do when I watch the Steelers: hope for the steel-town win (and Sheffield is, of course, one of those) but also hope for a lot of tackles to be applied judiciously to the wretch. But even if I am glad, glad, glad that the Blades cut ties with Evans and that's not hanging over the club anymore, I have to acknowledge that the team hasn't replaced that scoring source, either. The article linked above also mentioned a slew of other players who won't be returning, and another addition to that list is last season's keeper, Steve Simonsen.

Simonsen's release is probably the saddest part of this story because it all happened in the last game of the season. Simonsen managed to keep the Blades, and their lackluster scoring efforts, in the hunt for promotion back to the Championship (because Warnock poached Paddy Kenny, the Blades keeper I knew and loved, even when he was being a twit, for Queens Park Rangers in 2010, and I'm still pissed). But the Blades couldn't manage to get themselves into one of those two coveted automatic promotion spots. In April, I started to have cold sweats. The Blades, in the tenure of my fandom, have not done well in playoffs. Every bit of discussion about the League One's season's end reminded us all of that, too, and the prophesy fulfilled itself. Sheffield United lost to Huddersfield, 7-8 on penalty kicks, with eleven men from each team coming to the mark. That many PKs is ridiculous, especially since it highlights just how ludicrous the idea of defending against a penalty kick is. It's a guessing game. It's statistics--left versus right--far more than it is keeper skill versus shooter skill[5]. But the keepers took the last round of kicks. Huddersfield's keeper was successful against Simonsen. Simonsen, in his bid to tie and save the season for one more chance, fired high, over the cage. For all intents and purposes, by all accounts of the game statistics, Steven Simonsen lost that game because he failed to tie it. As the keeper, it's always on his shoulders, which is another reason I hate penalty kicks, no matter how many chances the rest of his team failed to convert. And Simonsen was, then, let go.

Cross-town rivals Sheffield Wednesday, who had been firmly lower on the local totem pole of success for my time as a Sheffield United fan, had earned themselves one of those automatic promotion spots. So now, I sit and wear my red and white and black and have to look up and see the blue and white--not in last place in the Championship--ahead. I don't like it. I like even less that Huddersfield is currently sitting second in that league, and though the season is still fewer than ten games in, it chafes to see them sitting in the "waltz into the EPL" spots. My bitter inner fan, which I try not to indulge much, though football seems to bring it out in me more than any other sport, wants to know, if they could do that in the next league, why not leave an opponent more vulnerable in the playoff-window?

The answer is that they were plenty vulnerable in that last game of the year. I watched the match, and it wasn't a good one. Sheffield United let Simonsen go after it, but, again, he didn't put them in a position to lose that game. He kept them in it, and the rest of the team didn't do their part. Them's the breaks.

I actually like the relegation system. I think it keeps the stakes high, and the UK football leagues (and many others) have made it work. But I'm not going to pretend that sitting here now, watching the system dismantle my team, which has certainly not helped itself in all of the ways that it could, doesn't suck. When players leave teams that have been relegated, they don't stay, generally, in that team's system. While there are development leagues for very young players, the system of English football doesn't function like the MLB or NHL. Players don't get called up or promoted; they leave. They leave for more playing time or they leave for better pay or they leave for a club with greater chances of success. Of course that happens in every other sport, but as someone who loves minor league sports and the whole interconnected farm-team system, the relegation system is difficult when it comes to following players. The center does not hold; the team, the place where I expect the team to be, is not fixed. That makes all players rivals. That makes every good player who leaves for another club (and good players, I think, should seek out the best competition and the best place for them, on the whole, because it is a competition) another reason that my team does not advance or, worse, slips further down the ladder. I can't be happy about it.

Sometimes there are exceptions, players I have always liked and will always like, wherever they are (maybe even if where they are is Manchester United, but thankfully that bond has not yet been tested). But I'm never hoping for it. When the Grand Junction Rockies were still the Casper Ghosts, I wanted to go to the ballpark and not see my favorite players because they'd been called up to Asheville or Modesto. But that was because the Ghosts were a fixed point. The rookie-ball team will remain the rookie team, and that team will never become an opponent in the greener pastures of Single-A. In a farm system, there can be a continuity of enthusiasm. Moving on, moving up the ladder, is a celebration for all involved: the player has had enough individual success to be noticed, the team and coaches have had enough collective success to provide an environment where the player can develop. Moving up is not moving out, not breaking up, not abandoning your people in the moment of greatest need.

In the relegation system, every team is suspect. There are no allies. And maybe that's why I get so shirty about Manchester United (their football-Yankeedom and Wayne Rooney notwithstanding). They are--along with City and Chelsea and Arsenal and everyone else--opponents in the most ideal of worlds. In the world in which Sheffield United claw their way back into the Championship and then into the Premier League, my team faces this competition. It doesn't really matter that, from League One, these actual versions of rivalry are at least two seasons, two full years, away. To rise all that way in just two seasons would be meteoric; it would require the kind of investments that Sheffield is not going to drum up. (Though if there are any Russian oil barons reading this who'd like a small, gritty, historically interesting Yorkshire football club to fund handsomely, I will bake you cookies to give Sheffield United serious consideration.) To rise that fast, with things as they are now, would be a tremendous fluke. It would not end well. Even when the rise is well-earned and deserved, the process is not kind.

I have experienced one season of the savage sweetness of top flight football for a newly promoted club. That was 2006-2007, and it was ugly. In the most ideal of worlds, where the Blades have made it back, it probably comes with that ass-kicking for a while. After promotion, it takes some time to build the club up to the rest of the competition. After relegation, if a team doesn't climb back in right away, they go as my Blades are going: swiping at air when players who are able to leave do, selling players (and even trimming administration) to keep the club afloat financially. With every departure, the angle steepens, the rungs creak and sag.

Worse, to me, is that whatever the team had been building as a club, in terms of its character, its consistency, its legacy, is necessarily pulled apart. Everything is unrealized potential. Everything is what might have been had we been able to let the reaction come to completion, had we let the album play. Even if it wasn't going to be great[6]. Even if it, in the most ideal of all worlds, led to an ass-kicking of one sort or another.

1. When the EPL was formed in 1992, the naming/structure of the English football system changed a bit, and the Championship/League One/League Two monikers arrived in 2004, and so by the time I really figured out what was going on, these were the names I had to work with. ↩

2. The Carlos Tevez/West Ham Debacle of 2007 is also part of this. West Ham did not force Sheffield United into relegation. Every game that the Blades didn't win, all on their own, all season, made that happen. But it was a lot of insult to injury, and the 2011 Carlos Tevez affair just dredged up all of the indignity and outrage again. Just because it was so much fuss over a player who has not managed himself well. (The Man City issue is also complex, full of hearsay and shades of meaning and unreliable narrators, but this is sports and I'm really not obligated to be all that reasonable when I don't want to be.) ↩

3. My mind is still blown over the Red Sox ditching Terry Francona. Even worse, they replace him with Bobby Valentine. Just. What? And then there's Jim Tracy & the Rockies. I don't have to be reasonable. Logic hasn't always got that much to do with all of this, anyway. ↩

4. There's nothing I love more in sports than "intangibles." Locker room leadership. Character. Hustle. Grit. Saberists, I'm sorry. I'm always a novelist first. ↩

5. In a fit of pique, I Googled "I hate penalty kicks." It turned up 2.5 million hits. Does anyone like them? ↩

6. For the record, I'm not real fond of that Warren G album. While I can still sing "Regulate," I also remember the "94 Ho Draft" just well enough to know that even as an eleven year old, I was pissed off. ↩