Crossword Newbie

I started working crossword puzzles about two months ago.  Since my siblings and two of my kids love them, I thought crosswords would give me some backup material when the conversational well ran dry. I hate games, but puzzles aren't so bad, and this kind involves only me, in private, against the New York Times, or Will Shortz, I guess. No dining room table face-offs. Crosswords are also supposed to be good for aging brains.

Now I'm addicted.

Here are some things I've noticed.

Crossword puzzle creators believe that all puzzlers are either Mensa members or wannabes. How do I know this? From the variety of clues that mean dumb, as in the following interchangeable synonyms, one appearing as a clue for the other: clod, nincompoop, bozo, dummkopf, lamebrain, oaf, simp. The word Mensa is a favorite answer to clues along the lines of organization of smart  people.

Puzzlers also do not like to think of themselves as geeks, clues for which are dweeb, twerp, and nerd. They are civilized--that is, they are not thugs, an oft-repeated answer to the clue riffraff. And they are certainly not mentally ill since they know the vernacular for insane: bonkers.

You'd have to be a little insane, however, to want to keep straight words as similar as

• Agra--home of the Taj Mahal
• atar or attar--perfume
• Atra--razor made by Gillette
• antrum--a hollow in a bone
• Aktay--a tributary to the Volga 

Puzzlers, and this is probably no surprise, are either already old or getting old fast. For every clue like Rapper ___ Jon (answer: Lil), there are five along the lines of 

• Star of Gunsmoke: James Arness (this series ran from 1955 to 1975).
• Friend of Lucy: Ethel Mertz (I Love Lucy ended in 1960).
• Univac's predecessor: Eniac (the first general-purpose computer, last used in 1955).

Clues are often purposely misleading. In a puzzle I worked yesterday, the answer to the clue Explorer and Navigator was SUVs. I got it. Ha!

There are a lot of sports clues. I recommend Google.

QED (big favorite in crosswords): People who work crossword puzzles consider themselves to be aging, sophisticated (as opposed to geeky), very smart, and of sound mind--even though they watch (or once watched) an awful lot of TV. Crossword puzzle creators accommodate.

The End of Writing School, or What Happens after You Learn (Most of ) What Pete Fromm Has to Teach You

Seaside, Oregon, where Pacific's winter residency is held.

I graduated from the low-residency Master of Fine Arts writing program at Pacific University in June of 2009, or almost four years ago. I've returned to about half the summer and winter residencies since, the last time as recently as January, when I holed up in a hotel room in Seaside and worked on a story, taking breaks to eat lunch with current students and to attend a few craft talks and readings. The teaching at Pacific is excellent, the faculty outstanding, but I think I've been going  back for something besides additional instruction and fellowship, something I didn't get while I was in the program and won't find there now.

Writing school is all about what not to do. In his craft talks and workshop comments, Pete Fromm, a wonderful teacher and an even better writer of fiction and nonfiction, conveyed to me a whole host of don't's, mixed in with a few do's. I once wrote them down in a list I called "Pete's Aesthetic," from most obvious (to me) to least.

• Start a story with direct action. 
• Starting a story with a dependent clause is lame.
• Avoid hedging, qualifying language—for example, “seemed to.”
• Weed out as many “to be” verbs as you can.
• Avoid language that points to cause and effect, and therefore to explanation, e.g. “so.” 
• A phrase like “at 2:00 this morning” screams “info dump.”  (Info dumps are lame.)
• Don’t force information into dialog.
• Fully imagine physical gestures and movements so as to avoid descriptions like “she closed her eyes hard.”
• Using a phrase like “her cousin” for someone the reader already knows is named Diana creates distance (usually a bad thing).
• Economy serves drama.  Include information, dialog, all elements of fiction only where they make the most impact. 
• Action should unfold in real time. Not “the movie was so noisy that Frankie almost didn’t hear the doorbell.” But instead, “Frankie clicked the mute, listened, and asked Allison if she’d heard the doorbell.”
• Small transitions are often needed to reduce the reader’s feeling of disjointedness.
• There’s no need to explain the motivation behind every movement. Movements usually explain themselves.
• Exclamation points are bad.
• Don’t state meaning.  If the reader doesn’t know what the story is about without the writer’s telling him, the story is in trouble.
• Find better ways to indicate time passing than clock readings.
• Details about the history of characters can’t seem randomly placed. They have to be integrated into the action of a story. 
• Sense details can be more randomly placed.  They are sometimes more evocative that way.
• Overused shorthand for thoughts and feelings—e.g. “she drew a blank”—should be avoided.
• Images move readers more if their impact is unfiltered through a character’s mind.  (This confused me, but I think what Pete meant is that even when your characters are very thoughtful people, you still want to protect readers from having an image interpreted for them.  Readers want to figure out for themselves why, as in Pete’s story “Hoot”--in Dry Rain--seeing an elk head mounted on a wall would disturb the protagonist. The protagonist himself should not tell us why.)
• Characters do think and have insights, but it’s stronger to show these insights to the reader through action and dialogue.  Pete: “When a thought would never be spoken or acted out, these are the killer spots to go inside the character’s head.” 
• It might be OK to describe emotions that wouldn’t show up in the scene you’re in, in order to set the scene.  (This came up when I read Richard Bausch’s story “Consolation,” in The Fireman’s Wife.) 
• Pete’s most severe allergy is to the naming of emotions. If you find yourself saying, Sally was angry, stop!  Show Sally’s anger.
• And, of course, characters should never cry.

MFA programs teach craft, and I seriously doubt if anyone is better at that than Pete. What results (if you're lucky and don't mind 20 or 30 revisions) is a particular kind of eventful and thrifty, even elegant, story, one of the best kinds of stories, but not the only kind.

So that's one thing I believe I missed at Pacific--learning to appreciate different kinds of stories. I chose my own reading list, of course, and it was diverse, but what I was encouraged to write and admire was not. And if now I want to give Nabokov a miss, or Cormac McCarthy, I don't believe it's entirely my  fault (although I do take credit for objecting to the scarcity of grown women in their books).

I'm not worried about being trapped by these boundaries. I've been reading for half a century, and I'll keep reading until the day I die. Writing too, I hope. I have plenty of time to broaden my horizons--with Jack Driscoll's stories, for example. Jack was another of my advisors. He subscribes, I think, to most of Pete's rules, but as a teacher he tends to be less prescriptive. He delivers the rules in a softer voice. And he himself writes a different sort of story altogether. His work may be an example of the old advice, learn the rules before you break them.

The more important thing I believe I missed at Pacific, and the thing I keep making fruitless trips back to find, has to do with why I write and how I might continue to write day after day, why I am drawn to face my fears on the page and why those fears sometimes defeat my efforts to keep my butt in my desk chair. I could try to list them here, but I'd just be describing their corners, the bumps on their irregular surfaces. Most of them I can't even name. So I'm going to bring someone else's voice in here, Bonnie Friedman's, author of Writing Past Dark: Envy, Fear, Distraction and Other Dilemmas in the Writer's Life.* Friedman earned her MFA at the University of Iowa.

Stories are machines inhabited by a god. School pointed out the cranks and spindles. . . . The method was mostly cautionary; it was easier to see where a story was broken than where it ran smooth. . . .

This was writing school but we did not talk about writing. We talked about what had got written. We came to find it faintly embarrassing to hear how these words came to be on this page. The writer's vision, the vocabularies we wished to dwell in, the hints of dreams and memories that haunted the edge of our work--verboten, not discussed. . . .

How to turn on the switch in ourselves that made writing possible? How to transform the texture of life--the heat shimmer of a highway in which everything attenuates and billows skyward, every solid thing a form of smoke--into the lucid corridors and conclusions of a short story? How to write despite fear? Questions we did not ask. . . .

So many of us were good in school, and we wanted to be good in school some more. We needed someone to say, Don't be good in school anymore. Be done with school. Be in school, but be done with school. Writing teaches writing. Your writing will teach you how to write if you work hard enough and have enough faith. 

Friedman suggests that MFA programs are not set up to meet the needs she describes above and may never be. She has met these needs either by socializing with writing colleagues (as opposed to teachers) or by writing into and through everything she can. Each of us eventually dukes it out with her own psyche in private, she implies, or makes friends with it, or both. Marvin Bell, one of the poets on Pacific's faculty, says that to learn to write, you must first, or simultaneously, learn how you're wired. How your mind works, or doesn't, I think he means, and how it might be made to work. He has some suggestions for how to do this, but I don't think they apply very directly to fiction. 

I won't be going back to Seaside in January or to the Pacific campus in Forest Grove in June. What I need to learn, they don't teach. I am getting a lot of help now from Kim Stafford, God (or whoever) bless him. I've been in his yearlong Fishtrap workshop since July. He is both showing and telling me what sanity and openness have to do with determination. His workshop will end, too.

Eventually I'll reach what Richard Rodriguez calls in Hunger of Memory "the end of education"-- the word end pointing two ways, toward education's purpose on the one hand, and on the other, toward the dock from which one embarks on one's own, all baggage jettisoned.


*Harper Perennial, 1994, pages 54 and 60.

Permission

Arthur, considering an exit from THE DRAWER

There’s a word for “people who are in their heads too much”: thinkers.   

This is Number 1 on "A Manifesto for Introverts," created by Susan Cain, author of Quiet, to whom I am everlastingly grateful. See her website: http://www.thepowerofintroverts.com

Number 4 is also pretty terrific: If the task of the first half of life is to put yourself out there, the task of the second half is to make sense of where you’ve been.  If teaching and raising children and finding love over an extended period of trial and error are putting myself out there, then I have. On to sense making.

Number 8 is a healthy prescription: In the long run, staying true to your temperament is the key to finding work you love and work that matters.

Number 11 is pure gift: It’s OK to cross the street to avoid making small talk.

Number 9 explains this blog:  Sometimes it helps to be a pretend-extrovert. There’s always time to be quiet later.  I haven't been showing up here to pretend much lately. I'm always glad when I do.

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Inspiring and Inspired

Judy Kleinberg is a poet, visual artist, and community builder here in Bellingham, Washington. Please don't miss her wonderfully varied, always surprising blog chocolate is a verb. Read it in the morning if you can, especially if you aren't a morning person. It will help. I promise.

Judy was kind enough to name Talking to Strangers a Very Inspiring Blog. She tells me that this means I have to share seven things about myself--as if I haven't already bent your ear.

I am the youngest of three. It seems unfair that I'm getting older at the same rate as my siblings. I hope I live long enough to write some of the books that are proceeding apace in my head.

Alex, Victor & Mary

I in turn raised three children. One would have been better, but which two would I have foregone? I ask you . . .

I know almost nothing about my forebears. My grandparents all died before I was born. In fact, they died before my parents were grown. My mother's mother died in 1918, for example, of the flu (when my mother was three) although she already had TB. Her first name was Octavia. I hang on to that. If she had lived longer, how could she not have grown into such a name?

I belong to a family of game players. I grew up playing pinochle with grownups when a fourth or sixth was needed. I sucked at it. I started losing board games to my middle son when he was six. Now I stay home while my husband runs a D and D game for my niece's family. I discourage game playing among my grown children. An evening of Settlers of Catan or hearts can set back peaceful coexistence by years.

However . . . at one point I played a wicked game of croquet. I can't explain why croquet is different from other games. Maybe it's that satisfying clunk of wood on wood. Maybe I like jumping through hoops. I know I like remembering my dad sending my mother's ball into the bushes. Games were one way for him to even the score. I mean score in a larger sense. As hard as we try not to be, we are all scorekeepers. Even my sweet, sweet dad. Even those of us who hate games.

This is my third marriage. Despite my husband's lethal toenails, and the one and only game of Risk we played the first year we were married, it has lasted 28 years.

Keats on his Deathbed,
sketched by Joseph Severn

I have visited the house next to the Spanish Steps in Rome where John Keats died. He was 25. He contracted tuberculosis from caring for his tubercular brother. He remains for me the perfect illustration of the costs of love, duty, and family.

I write fiction--an absorbing, but lonely vocation. I blog to reach out. Please reach back. I appreciate all comments.

Here are a few blogs (besides Judy's) that I visit again and again, for inspiration, friendship, information, and wisdom:

Quiet Minds, by Jan Priddy

Tamaranth's Creative Reading, by Tamaranth

Pam Writes, by Pam Parker

Katey Schultz, Writer @ Large, by Katey herself

Some Mad Hope, by Heidi Willis

Renouncements

Here are a few things I’ll probably never do:

Read Lolita, despite the fact that “you can always count on a murderer [and pedophile] for a fancy prose style.”

See Django or any less “artistic” glorification of violence (such as, say, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) even when the violence may be, from most perspectives, even my own, justifiable.

Kazantzakis's epitaph: I hope for
 nothing, I fear nothing, I am free.

Go back to Bread Loaf or the Vermont Studio Center or Italy or London--or see Moscow or Vienna or Yeats’s grave for the first time. If I haven’t seen it so far (as, for instance, I have seen Kazantzakis’s grave in Heraklion), my conscience, slippery and self-serving as it is, will not look kindly on this personal use of jet fuel.

Encourage my children to have children, although I am longing for babies (and my own reproductive system is, of course, defunct). If babies do arrive I will be crazy with happiness and cherish them above all human beings except my husband and their parents--okay, maybe more, at least for a while. This is not a subject on which most people are sane. I am no exception.

Keep indulging my once-a-month craving for red meat. It’s starting to make me sick.

Likewise, red wine. It’s already making me sick. This has been and will continue to be a struggle.

Go back to therapy. I’ve had some fruitful experiences, but therapy is about adjusting to the world as we find it, and if we continue to do that . . . things are way past serious, folks.

Go back to church. Even the most inclusive cannot help theorizing about what separates good people from bad.

Keep getting my hair colored—if you know me you will realize how big a renouncement this is.

Judgment Days

“Come judgment day I’d testify before God that he was not a cruel or heartless man,” Henry says of his father in “This Season of Mercy,” one of ten stories in Jack Driscoll’s The World of a Few Minutes Ago (Wayne State University Press, 2011.) “On other, lesser counts,” Henry adds, “[my father is] guilty as charged.” What 13-year-old Henry doesn’t realize is that more than one judgment day is in store for him. For just as losses—small deaths—prepare us for final darkness, accumulating evidence weighs us down until we have no choice but to stop and ask ourselves what kind of people we or our loved ones have become--not ultimately maybe, but so far. These smaller judgment days are the occasions for the stories in Jack’s book.

Jack was one of my faculty advisors in the MFA program at Pacific University, so I can’t bring myself to refer to him conventionally as Driscoll. He’s a lovely, generous man and was an intuitive, open-minded, and saving advisor, but I’m far enough from my degree now (Fiction 2009) that I could read the stories in this volume with some objectivity (or so I think), as if they were written by one of the short-story masters on my MFA reading list—William Maxwell, say, or Carol Bly. 

Here’s what I want to say about them: they require courage. I’ve lived with them for a year before writing about them because first I had to recover from a broken heart. 

In the Pushcart Prize-winning "Prowlers," a man in love with a woman addicted to breaking and entering must decide how to deal with her latest, most dangerous exploit, stealing a horse.  

                    

In "After Everyone Has Left," a father who dozed off for a minute at the beach and woke to find that his daughter, Ellie, had been abducted, shows up for the execution of the man who, some twenty years later, has confessed to Ellie's murder. While awaiting this other man's death, he sees his own life flash before his eyes. Jack manages not to confuse while telling both front and back stories in the present tense.

In "The Dangerous Lay of the Land," a 17-year-old girl who has been neglected and horrifically abused must decide whether to trust the teacher who offers to take her home in a snowstorm, then suggests a detour.  

In the title story, a photographer in his seventies, having spent most of his life in war zones, stands under the stars at home recalling his relationships--the easier ones first, with three women not his wife, then the harder, with his son, now dead, and his wife, who no longer recognizes him.

In “This Season of Mercy,” my favorite story, we follow Henry as he tries to decode his father’s behavior and his mother’s response to it. Why does his dad come home dressed as a woman? What precipitated the bloody fighting that landed his father in jail? Henry is not without clues. The slaughterhouse where his father works may have laid him off again. It isn't unusual for his father to fight when he drinks. But why the cross-dressing? Gradually Henry discovers, and I didn't catch on any faster than he did, that his father is a whistleblower, taking exception to shortcuts and sadism at the slaughterhouse, stealing records, shutting the place down, and putting the whole town's livelihood in jeopardy. Henry's dad was "just some local nobody who'd refused to serve what he did not believe in and could not cure." But Henry sees him afresh, even as his family must leave town. 

Most of these stories revolve around men, fathers, who are either violent or, because they are the breadwinners in a violent culture, have to make compromises with violence too major to leave their personalities intact. The men will make you sick at the same time as you learn, in a storm of telling detail and idiosyncratic language, how they got that way. Told either in first person or by very close third-person narrators, these stories are voice-driven, but not in the way you might expect. Maybe because Jack was a poet before he began writing fiction, the diction and syntax of his voices are half neighborhood and half melody. In "Sky Riders," for example, boy narrator Buzz describes a motorbike route he and his friend Iwo favor:

". . . we tore-ass across the Malicks' back eighty, right between the waist-high cornrows and up past the crib barn to the access road that intersected the towering high-tension lines. From there we had just a quick-hitch sprint to our promontory outpost hat overlooked Route 664, where we'd hit our kill switches and wait for my mom, rain or shine."

I wish the women in these stories were stronger. Most are ill or damaged or absent. Charlene in "Saint Ours" is the exception. She decides not to settle for a man so shut down he doesn't want to know anything about her--a side effect, maybe, of his life as a hunting guide--and when we leave her she's lighting out for something better, though this book, taken as a whole, suggests that she won't find it.

The father-to-son transmission of anger and violence is the unifying theme of these stories. As a teacher, however, one of Jack's favorite terms is redemption. Just when you think he couldn't possibly identify any promise of happiness or peace in the small frozen towns of Michigan, he does--usually in the last lines of his stories. Charlene, accelerating, sees "the power lines gleam in the rearview like harp strings." The photographer in the title story imagines the bulbs his dementia-ridden wife plants each fall as "things long lost bursting back alive again and again into this earthly world." Henry in "This Season of Mercy," seeing his parents kiss, wonders if everything that has happened to his family is, "if not a blessing, then something approximate to that."

Harper Lee's Atticus Finch said that "you never really know a man until you stand in his shoes and walk around." Jack offers an experience equal to that. You can learn the hard truths of the lives captured in these ten stories if you are brave enough. 

Movies for the End Times

Martin Freeman as Bilbo, puzzling things out.

My husband and I went to see The Hobbit on Friday, opening day, a few hours after I combed through the major online news sites looking for some reason to believe that accounts of what was happening in Newtown, Connecticut were wildly exaggerated. Instead, the news grew worse, and better verified, by the minute.

I'm sorry to tell you that, unlike the Lord of the Rings movies, which I have watched at least ten times each, The Hobbit is long, boring, stupid, and bone-crushingly violent. It is saved only by Martin Freeman, whose lovely face registers Bilbo's moral education step by step, although director Peter Jackson gives this process very little screen time. The film's homicidal mayhem, cheesy as it was, hit me hard on a day when I was already reeling.

The Tolkien books mean a lot to me (as they do to so many) because Victor, 27, my younger son, middle child of the family, fell in love with them when he was seven. I’ve had many excellent days in my nearly sixty years, but those I spent reading these books aloud to him were among the best, because I was reading them for the first time myself, and because I caught a glimpse of who Victor would become as he made sense of the characters and events in Tolkien’s stories. These books helped me raise him. They made the point, although imperfectly--consider the cheap lives of orcs--that we all count, that the choices we make all count.

But that’s not what I want to say here. I’m having trouble getting to the point.

When we go to the movies, my husband and I play a game with the previews. We count how many we have to sit through before the feature begins and then later try to remember which films were previewed. We rarely can. The movies are so forgettable, so indistinguishable, that their titles and elevator pitches fall right out of our heads. I can reconstruct the preview line-up from yesterday, however, without strain, not because the films were more distinct from one another, but because they all seemed to answer the same fear. Here are the previews that preceded The Hobbit in Bellingham, Washington, my home town.

Oblivion, starring Tom Cruise and Morgan Freeman. The tagline for this sci-fi film is "Earth is a memory worth fighting for," meaning, apparently, that earth has been abandoned but hope is not dead. Drone repairman Tom Cruise, while tinkering with old machinery on now uninhabitable Earth, discovers something. Note the word "memory," implying loss, just not total loss.

Idris Elba--Wowsers!--in Pacific Rim

Pacific Rim, starring Idris Elba, the handsomest man alive, who screams during the trailer, "We’re canceling the apocalypse!"--this because the human race has rallied to create giant robots capable of battling the dinosaur-like creatures who have crawled through an undersea wormhole from another dimension (I'm not joking).

After Earth, starring Will Smith and directed by M. Knight Shyamalan. Smith's character and his son's get stranded on  Earth 1000 years after it has been abandoned. Every single decision you make, Smith tells his son, is life or death.

Nicholas Hoult in Warm Bodies

Warm Bodies, starring no one I've ever heard of and John Malkovich. One still-living non-zombie girl teaches a planet full of zombies that love can bring them back to life. At least this is how I understood the preview.

Beautiful Creatures, based on a popular young adult book by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl. Dark magic on what was formerly a slave-holding plantation. The old plantation is as close as we get to a dead earth in this film, unless you count the fact that Emma Thompson and Jeremy Irons agreed to star in it.

Aliens attacking earth is a hoary tradition in Hollywood, as are dystopian films like the Mad Max series, Bladerunner, and The Road. But four movies about the looming or already total end of human life as we know it and of the earth as a habitable planet? Surely this is significant. These four films all include a loophole, a chance that our species will continue either here, via what amounts to a miracle, or elsewhere, because when the shit starts coming down, a few people have the good sense to gas up the rocket ship.


And these previews, don't forget, were followed by the transforming of a beloved, light-hearted children's story into image after image of wholesale slaughter.

All of which means to me that, as hard as many are trying to ignore rapidly accelerating climate change,* the message is seeping into our subconscious minds, and Hollywood is answering the need to deal with it obliquely, by offering films in which all is lost, but not quite.

*If you have missed the news that a temperature increase of 4-6 degrees Celsius, which would mean the slow or fast extinction of our species, is possible, even likely, if we do nothing, and maybe even if we act, by 2100, or sooner, if feedback loops kick in . . . you might for a start read this report from ABC News: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-12-03/annual-report-shows-carbon-emissions-continue-to-grow/4403778. The braver among us might watch a presentation by Guy McPherson at http://guymcpherson.com/2012/11/speaking-in-louisville-and-a-couple-essays/.