December 18: Between the Lines at BAM

Dark Hand and Lamplight will make their New York City debut Thurdsay night as part of Rear Windows, the final installment of our Between the Lines series at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Also with Ian Chillag, Félix Dufour-Laperrière, Jesmyn Ward, and Eva Weber. More information and tickets here.

Writing Home:
Keith Lee Morris Checks in from Sandpoint

Thomas Wolfe couldn’t go home and William Faulkner couldn’t seem to leave very successfully and Ernest Hemingway seemed to be looking for some lost idea of it everywhere and T.S. Eliot apparently found it about five minutes after arriving in England, becoming even paler and more prunish and speaking with an accent, and then you’ve got Annie Proulx who seems to feel so right at home just about anywhere she is that she can’t get a pen in her hand fast enough to suit her, and there’s Eudora Welty who says home is where everything begins, really, in whatever little place, to which someone like James Baldwin might say, Yeah, right, it does, and isn’t that a bitch, and then F. Scott Fitzgerald comes along and trumps them all by pointing out how home is not just a place, but a place in time, how we’re all borne (born?) ceaselessly into the past.

Which is a fancy (or maybe just muddled) way of saying that I arrived in my hometown of Sandpoint, Idaho, again last week, at the end of a ten-day book tour. My last reading was in Moscow, home of the University of Idaho. The owner of the bookstore there, a nice man named Bob Greene who’s had me read there before, miscalculated a bit this time around, scheduling my reading on the same day as the Idaho-Boise State football game. The biggest problem wasn’t the small crowd, almost all the members of which I knew personally, but the lack of vacant motel rooms. I was traveling with four of my buddies from high school, and we huddled in John’s Alley, the local watering hole, trying to figure out what to do besides drink beer. Someone finally mentioned that we might as well go to Sandpoint, and I tapped my ruby red slippers and there I was, a mere three hours later, walking down First Avenue with a group of people I’d known since I was about twelve, effectively thrust back into my childhood and adolescence. We ended the evening, appropriately, playing darts in a bar which, when I was a kid, was the town’s only Mexican restaurant, and which, as an adult, I first met my wife in. The town still feels like home, and it’s still where most of my fiction is set.

Okay, I know, a lot of writers—a lot of people in general—leave their hometowns and never look back, or they only do so regretfully. Has Tom (not Thomas) Wolfe ever written about Richmond? What’s he trying so hard to forget—the ballet lessons he was forced to take there? Can anyone imagine that Donald Barthelme actually grew up in Houston? But I think that writers are, by and large, a bunch that looks steadily, if not ceaselessly, into the past, and that they tend to draw their inspiration more from the way back when than the here and now. Joyce, who went to France and forever wrote about Dublin. Twain, some part of him always attached to that river. Cather, holed up in Greenwich Village but still thinking about the grassy plains.

Me? Home is a small town inside a ring of mountains, on the shore of a massive glacial lake. Population roughly 7,000 now, 4,144 back when I was a teenager (I can remember it exactly from the sign on the bridge into town—at the next census, the number on the sign changed to 4,305). Why do I keep writing about Sandpoint? Here’s a three-part theory that I’ll advance in regard to writers and their hometowns in general:

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You Can't Say That! Keith Lee Morris
on Homecoming and Banishment

Keith Lee Morris's story Testimony appeared in Issue 3 of A Public Space. His new novel, The Dart League King, is out this month from Tin House Books.

I’m from north Idaho and most of my fiction is set there, so last month I met up with several old friends in my hometown of Sandpoint, where Tin House Books helped my friend Denise organize a book launch party for The Dart League King.

It was at Pend Oreille Winery, a very nice place owned by a high-school friend of mine. My high-school English teacher, Mrs. Love, was there, and lots of other folks I hadn’t seen in forever. My friends are gracious to a fault in playing host. They all buy copies of my latest book and ask questions about it and buy me drinks afterward... basically it’s an ongoing conspiracy to humor me by pretending that I’m special when the truth is, as everyone in town who’s paying any attention knows, the real writer from Sandpoint is Pulitzer winner Marilynne Robinson, whose book about the town, Housekeeping—has, mmm, well, it’s done a little better than any of my own.

I once took a workshop from Ms. Robinson, whose fiction I admire immensely (Housekeeping really is one of the most beautiful and intelligent novels I’ve ever read). At the end of the week-long course, I had an individual meeting with MR to talk about my work. I envisioned it as a literary milestone of sorts, the passing of the torch from one highly respected Idaho author to a highly promising (this was my view, at any rate) youngster from the same neck of the woods, a scene that would be recounted years hence by serious biographers.

It turned out, though, that she doesn’t like the sort of thing I do as much as I like the sort of thing she does. I had this short story with a character who cussed so much that even I was offended, and we had a discussion about it (him) that after roughly twenty years or so I remember this way:

“You can’t do this,” Marilynne Robinson says to me.

“Huh?” I say to her.

“This won’t work,” she says.

“What?” I say to her.

“All this cursing.”

“What?”

“No one talks this way.”

“What?”

“No one uses this much profanity,” she says to me. “No one talks this way.”

“What?” I say.

“What’s wrong with you?” Marilynne Robinson asks.

“Look,” I say, “I know this place called the Capricorn Lounge. Come down there with me tonight. Every single person in the Capricorn Lounge talks this way.”

“No, thank you,” Marilynne Robinson says to me.

Sigh.

She was probably right, about all the cussing, I mean, and I probably should have learned my lesson way back then, but no, apparently I did not. The Dart League King, I found out recently, has already been sent packing by one angry bookstore owner due to its excessive profanity (it’s really just one character, and I would think a bookstore owner could tell the difference between a profane character and a profane novel, but all right, whatever).

The nice lady who owns the store in Spokane, Washington, told my publisher that even though she had agreed to schedule a reading for me, that was before she’d actually read the book, and now she wouldn’t be requiring my services. Maybe she wanted my writing to be more like that nice young man’s she had in the bookstore once, Chuck Palahniuk—he has a really interesting anecdote about his visit to her store, which you can read here.

That’s it for now—next time I think I’ll talk about Sarah Palin, who’s also from my hometown. And maybe about why I still have such a strong bond with my old friends from there and what that has to do with writing, if anything

Debt

Fiction from Sana Krasikov.

Lev has worried all afternoon that his niece and her husband won’t find his house. It is easy to miss the turnoff for Todd Road and get lost in a maze of half-paved, wooded roads that are part of the town’s semirural fantasy about itself. He is relieved now to see the step-van pulling into his driveway, the late sun bouncing in a streak off the vehicle’s metal siding.

“Yes, okay, I have the address,” Sonya’s husband had told him earlier today, when Lev was giving him directions.

“The address won’t help. Just listen to me...”

“I am listening.”

It had been one of those exchanges where the other person’s sentences seemed always to begin in the middle of your own.

Three years ago, Sonya had sent him and Dina a photo of herself and Meho in a wedding chapel with vinyl records and photos of old movie stars on the walls. A year and a half later, a second picture had arrived in the mail: a professional snapshot of a dark-eyed infant girl posing on a cushion, a studio backdrop of painted clouds behind her. “Our angel has arrived,” it said beneath. When Lev attached the card to their refrigerator, Dina had wondered out loud why someone would burden their child with a name like Andjela Bliss.

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Politics Is a Craft

Peter Orner's Illustrated History of Chicago Politics, which appears in the current issue, with illustrations by Eric Orner, tells the stories of that city's political characters, including Paddy Bauler, Jane Byrne, Richard Daley, and Harold Washington. Here is Peter Orner on Bernie Epton, who lost to Harold Washington, the city’s first African American mayor, in the 1983 mayoral election. You can read a brief history of that race here.

VISIONS OF BERNIE EPTON (1983)

He comes to me sometimes in my awake dreams, shouting, Shut up, shut up, shut up…

Election night, 1983. Maybe it was exhaustion. Or maybe the campaign had, finally, driven him as bonkers as some Washington partisans accused him of having been all along. On paper, the man was a living miracle. He won 48.6 percent of the vote as a Republican running in Chicago. Of course it wouldn’t have happened if the Democratic nominee hadn’t been you know who. A vote for Bernie Epton was a vote for survival, plain and simple.

Do you want Chicago to become the next Detroit? Cleveland needs a run for its money? St. Louis? I was a punk kid in November of ’83 watching it all on television, but even I knew that Epton was a wild-eyed Republican from another planet. And a Jew no less.

Not to put too fine a point on it but Mother said we were Democrats before we were Jews. And, really, was the world ready for another Jewish savior? Especially one so funny looking? Hard to see Bernie Epton in the role. Epton’s lopsized eggy head one more thing he didn’t want exposed to the world along with his sealed psychiatric records.

But that night in Chicago he was a hangnail from being Mayor. Channel Two kept going back and forth from Harold Washington’s raucous victory party to Epton’s bizarre concession. It was hard then not to see Epton as some kind of weird looking white sacrifice. Shut up, shut up, shut up, he shouted at his supporters. They were cheering him on and Bernie couldn’t take it anymore.

He wanted to talk. He wanted to say something profound. His great-great uncle was a rabbi from Shershov. He had wisdom to dispense. I’m an intellectual, a lakefront liberal Jew for God’s sake. I never meant for it to get so out of hand. I’m only a human being. Who wouldn’t have been seduced by the possibility? God grants you how many chances at immortality? And if there’s somebody somewhere who holds a title more noble than His Honor Mayor of the City of Chicago we never heard of him in Illinois. I didn’t play the race card, other people snatched it out of my hand and laid it down for me. Blame a man for going along for the ride for the good of the city? Win first, heal later. Wasn’t that the plan? If the people in the streets have to call Harold Washington a child molester to stop him from getting elected than they’ve got to call him a child molester. Cicero called Cataline a lot worse in the name of for the good of the Republic. Cicero said he murdered his own son to marry his wife, that he had sex with donkeys, all kinds of unspeakable things. That’s politics.

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Politics Is a Craft: Part Two
Peter Orner on Harold Washington

Harold Washington was reelected to a second term on April 7, 1987, defeating Jane Byrne in the Democratic primary and Edward Vrdolyak in the general election. He died unexpectedly on November 25, 1987, at City Hall. You can read more about Harold Washington's place in Chicago's political history in Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father.

HAROLD WASHINGTON WALKS AT MIDNIGHT (1998)
OUT AT MIDWAY AIRPORT

Of Harold Washington, they used to say that as long as he had politics he’d never be lonely. And that was all well and good while he was alive, but caused some problems for the mayor in heaven. First he didn’t appreciate that the gates were pearly. Is this some sort of subliminal message? Then he challenged Gabriel for Arch Angel on a reform ticket and nearly pulled it off with forty-seven percent of the vote. Disgruntled and sub-angels supported him in droves. Over the years he caused so much trouble that finally, God, just to get rid of him for a while, let him come home for a small, unannounced visit.

It was Martha who spotted him by the baggage claim, long after the last flight had come and gone. She was sweeping up, the last hour of her shift. She said he wasn’t sad-seeming, but his face had the haggard look of someone who has been crying for years in one way or another.

“Do you know what I mean?” she asked her friend Lucy, the only person she told this to, the only person who might believe her. They were having lunch in the employee cafeteria.

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From the Hills of Fauquier County

Descendants of Chief Justice John Marshall return home for a family reunion. Peyton Marshall reports, in the new issue.

I pinned my name tag to my jacket. That evening there was a getting-to-know-you cocktail party. I chatted with various cousins who asked me what I did. Most were only mildly curious, looking over my shoulder in anticipation of their next connection, but one man questioned me intently. His name was Neil and he was a historian. “And did you enjoy selling real estate?” he asked.

I smiled. Nobody wants to hear the truth at a cocktail party so I talked about all the good things in Iowa and the charming little towns that populate the prairie. I told Neil about the times I showed farmhouses miles from anywhere and how the prairie roads are laid out on longitudinal lines. Every few miles they dead-end and shift eastward to correct for the curvature of the earth. I talked about the beauty of the grasslands and how the native species have a six-foot root system designed to survive fire.

I didn’t mention that Dale, my boss at Hoover Real Estate, was my constant companion as I learned to sell—or not sell—houses. Dale was an ex-radio DJ who furtively peeled scabs off his balding pate and then ate them. He kept a box of wigs and wacky glasses under his desk in case someone was “in need of a laugh.”

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Dirty Politics, Designer Kisses, and More

Issue 6 is: Peyton Marshall on celebrity family reunions; Dubravka Ugresic on setting off alarms; Keith Lee Morris on getting lost on purpose; Colleen Kinder on defining Iceland; and Martha Cooley on the sounds of silence. With new stories by Peter Orner (with illustrations by Eric Orner), Gary Amdahl, Sana Krasikov, and Preeta Samarasan; and new poems by Cathy Park Hong, Tom Yuill, Major Jackson, Billy Collins, and others, and translations by John Ashbery and Luc Sante. In the Focus portfolio, the state of Italian literature. And Jono Rotman at White Sands Missile Range Museum on the cover.

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