Idyll Banter

Well, it's here. A new year. 2006. We have now reached the second half of the first decade of a new millennium, and still we don't have a moniker for this 10th of the 21st century. Obviously it's not the '90s. (That was an easy one to name.) It's certainly not the '70s. (Thank heavens. Any decade that encouraged men to wear leisure suits and puffy satin disco shirts is best forgotten.) And it's clear by the size of our TV screens (big) and computers (small) that it's not the '50s -- though, apparently, there are people in the White House who want it to be.

Jo Sabel Courtney, a public relations and marketing executive with the Stowe Area Association, suggested this decade is the "aught" decade. Or, she added, "blank, bottom, cipher, duck egg, goose egg, nada, nadir, naught, nil, nix, nullity, zilch, zip, zot." Her favorite? "Zot."

My college pal Adam Turteltaub recommended the "double zeros."

And Andrea Wolga Freeman, an electrical engineer, told me she wanted to title this decade the "ought naughts," because "there are a lot of things we 'ought naught' to have done."

Freeman, however, might not be the best person to name anything involving a new year -- much less a new decade. She and her husband once had a New Year's Eve party in Stowe that ended around 10 o'clock. When one couple showed up at 10:30, she and her husband and their two little boys were already in bed. Freeman's defense? (And it's actually pretty good.) She had invited lots of people with small children.

The truth is, New Year's Eve is often anticlimactic. We expect to comingle Bacchanalian revelry with a zeal for self-improvement, and so I think it's inevitable that we wind up a little let down. And, of course, there's that whole mortality thing going on in the backs of our minds: Another whole calendar can be thrown away.

Nevertheless, it's clear that some people feel that our current decade has had a particularly inauspicious first half. When I was asking folks what they would call this period, no one suggested we call it the Roaring Aughts. Or the Space Aughts. Or the Wonder Aughts. Even the most forgiving and lenient grader has to admit that history isn't going to smile on the last six years.

Now, my goal this morning isn't to make anyone's New Year's hangover any worse than it already is. Some of you, alas, already feel like bobblehead dolls with legs.

Rather, I want to remind us that we still have roughly a half-decade left to turn this epoch around. Can we stop a tsunami? Unlikely. Can we rebuild the levees in New Orleans so they can withstand a serious hurricane? Well, if we're going to have a city below sea level, I certainly hope so.

One of the many reasons I love Vermont is that we're a small state. (Other reasons? We're not Florida. We don't have a bodybuilder for a governor. And we don't have drive-up windows at our liquor stores.) That means that we are capable, on occasion, of accomplishing things here that make other states drool. To wit: Our children have health care.

So, today I am not making New Year's resolutions. I'm making Half-Decade resolutions. Just for the record, I should note that I have never in my life actually kept a New Year's resolution. But that isn't going to stop me from at least approaching the next half-decade with hope, fervor, and inspiration.

If we all work together, can we actually make the world a better place? Probably not. But with a little luck, a little sweat and a really big thesaurus, at the very least we can come up with a name for this decade that won't leave us feeling blue. None of us, after all, want our grandchildren to look back on this period as the Loser Aughts.

Happy New Year.
(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press, January 1, 2006.)

Idyll Banter

Wanda Goodyear had one of the great names of all time: A name that wouldn't surprise you if you found it residing at the end of a line in a limerick or in a novel of serious merit. I can see the name in my mind in a book by Dreiser. Or Capote. Or even J.K. Rowling. There she is, Wanda Goodyear, a student traipsing in her robes through the cold stone corridors of Hogwarts.

Wanda died the other day at her home high on the gap here in Lincoln, a neighbor and friend who I will miss greatly. She was 81.

Wanda appeared with some frequency in this column. (Technically, I know, I should be calling her by her last name. But when you're a writer and you have at your disposal a name like Wanda, you simply have to use it.) There was the little girl who once was stuck up to her knees in the muck that days earlier had been a dirt road; there was the harried mom on the dairy farm who on one occasion buried her eyeglasses in the box with the dead family cat, and on another, baked them in the oven in a casserole full of beans; there was the senior citizen who had the audacity to try to bring her sewing scissors onto an airplane; and there was the library trustee who held a book sale at the end of her driveway all summer and fall, year-in and year-out, to raise money for her beloved Lincoln Library. It wouldn't have crossed her mind to lock her door or not offer a cup of coffee (or dinner) to any neighbor who dropped by for an unexpected visit.

Wanda was part of a generation that was still vibrant when my wife and I moved to Vermont 20 years ago, but is now disappearing all too quickly. These were the women and men who ran dairy farms that didn't have bulk tanks, who sugared religiously, and who could describe precisely what it was like to clear out the furniture, get out the fiddles, and have a good old-fashioned kitchen tunk.

In the last decade we have said goodbye once and for all to a great many of Wanda's peers. Among the litany here in Lincoln? The brothers Brown (Don and Fletcher), a pair of women named Lois (Sargent and Perfect), Paul Goodyear, Gyneth Hartwell, and a pair of writers who weren't born in Vermont but understood the Green Mountains as well as anyone: Ron Rood and Roger Shattuck. Every small town on the chain of mountains that bisects our state like a spine has endured similar losses: The death of folk who are resourceful, hearty and independent. Stoic. Too smart to be sentimental. A generation that remembers what hardscrabble Vermont really was like.

I try not to romanticize people just because they know how to repair a 1923 Fordson field tractor or can recall the days when the postman might not have been able to make it to a village's outlying farms in a blizzard. But I can't help it: They impress the hell out of me.

Two months ago I was talking with Wanda at a birthday party for one of her grandchildren. (Wanda had a lot of grandchildren. And great-grandchildren. She had 14 of the former and 16 of the latter.) She was sitting in a chair, and I was kneeling on the carpet beside her. I felt a bit like a pupil at her feet, but the truth is I always feel like a novice Vermonter when I'm conversing with the serious elders of Wanda's generation. She was frail, and I sensed this would be one of the last times we would chat. It was.

But our conversation wasn't especially wistful: Wanda was far too plainspoken to ever get maudlin. Besides, there in the room with us was her infant great-granddaughter: Wanda Grace Goodyear.

Young Wanda Grace won't remember her great-grandmother, and her Vermont will be very different from even the one I first witnessed two decades ago. But I am confident that it will still be an altogether inspiring world. Why? Because, thank heavens, there are still parents among us with the confidence to name their girls Wanda.

No one would ever want Wanda Grace to replicate her great-grandmother. Given her parents and her older siblings, there is no doubt that she will grow into her own woman.

But it's a wondrous name to carry in our corner of Vermont -- and a beautiful reminder of another Wanda from another era.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press, January 8, 2006.)

I'm asked on occasion what advice I might offer aspiring writers. Here are ten random suggesstions -- the last a reference to the fact I was told by a creative writing professor when I was in college that I should become a banker.

1) Don’t merely write what you know. Write what you don’t know. It might be more difficult at first, but – unless you’ve just scaled Mount Everest or found a cure for all cancers – it will also be more interesting.

2) Do some research. Read the letters John Winthrop wrote to his wife, or the letters a Civil War private sent home to his family from Antietam, or the stories the metalworkers told of their experiences on the girders high in the air when they were building the Empire State Building. Good fiction is rich with minutiae – what people wore, how they cooked, how they filled the mattresses on which they slept – and often the details you discover will help you dramatically with your narrative.

3) Interview someone who knows something about your topic. Fiction may be a solitary business when you’re actually writing, but prior to sitting down with your computer (or pencil or pen), it often demands getting out into the real world and learning how (for instance) an ob-gyn spends her day, or what a lawyer does when he isn’t in the courtroom, or exactly what it feels like to a farmer to milk a cow when he’s been doing it for 35 years. Ask questions. . .and listen.

4) Interview someone else. Anyone else. Ask questions that are absolutely none of your business about their childhood, their marriage, their sex life. They don’t have to be interesting (though it helps). They don’t even have to be honest.

5) Read some fiction you wouldn’t normally read: A translation of a Czech novel, a mystery, a book you heard someone in authority dismiss as “genre fiction.”

6) Write for a day without quote marks. It will encourage you to see the conversation differently, and help you to hear in your head more precisely what people are saying and thereby create dialogue that sounds more realistic. You may even decide you don’t need quote marks in the finished story.

7) Skim the thesaurus, flip through the dictionary. Find new words and words you use rarely – lurch, churn, disconsolate, effulgent, intimations, sepulchral, percolate, pallid, reproach – and use them in sentences.

8) Lie. Put down on paper the most interesting lies you can imagine. . .and then make them plausible.

9) Write one terrific sentence. Don’t worry about anything else – not where the story is going, not where it should end. Don’t pressure yourself to write 500 or 1,000 words this morning. Just write 10 or 15 ones that are very, very sound.

10) Pretend you’re a banker, but you write in the night to prove to some writing professor that she was wrong, wrong, wrong. Allow yourself a small dram of righteous anger.

If you wonder often why the great civilizations of early Mesopotamia disappeared – And, gosh, who doesn’t? – it’s probably because their bricks smelled like dog poop. My daughter tried to make a mere two bricks for Social Studies last month, and for days our house smelled like a kennel of dogs with diarrhea. It wasn’t pretty.

My daughter was making the bricks as part of a seventh grade homework assignment. Her Social Studies teacher at Mount Abraham High School, Barb Simoes, was helping the kids transition from the study of early nomadic civilizations to a study of Mesopotamia, and so she had them begin by making bricks. They were supposed to use clay, because Mesopotamia was a river civilization and the ancient Mesopotamians used clay for everything. They depended on clay the way we depend on Pentium processors, although that meant their laptops were much heavier than ours.

The kids would then bring their homemade bricks to school, where they would be subjected to a rigorous series of tests: Could they support fifty pounds of weight? Survive a dunking in a bucket of water? Be capable of being rolled five times? I love tests like these, because there are no tiny ovals you have to fill in with a number two pencil.

Of course, the students were only supposed to use whatever materials were handy in their yards, because a key part of the lesson was, as Simoes explained, “people use the resources available to them.” One year, Simoes told me, an enterprising lad made his brick out of melted and refashioned Skittles candy. Obviously, the Mesopotamians didn’t have Skittles, but if they had their civilization might still be flourishing: That brick, Simoes said, was mighty impressive.

Unfortunately, we don’t have any clay in our yard (or Skittles in the house), and so my daughter got dirt from different spots around the vegetable garden and the barn. It was almost dark when she was gathering her dirt, a detail that might have been a factor in what she scooped up for her bricks and what would occur over the following days.

That night my wife looked at the dirt and water and flour that our daughter was mixing in a pair of bread pans, and thought they might need some help. And so she suggested adding a little corn starch to the mixture. “After all,” she said to me later, “it thickens gravy.”

Indeed: All great architectural accomplishments begin with gravy.

Then they set the bricks on the woodstove to cook. A woodstove isn’t exactly a kiln, but then dirt and corn starch aren’t exactly clay. And so it seemed to make sense.

Almost instantly the house was infused with a rich, robust potpourri that smelled, I imagine, like a Mesopotamian sewage treatment plant. My wife insists that my daughter and I were overreacting. “The bricks most certainly did not smell like dog poop,” she said. “They smelled like barf.”

Oh.

In any event, our daughter gamely brought her dried bricks to school. “As I walked down the hallway,” she said, “people walked the other way. And when we were testing them outside, people thought they were made of dog poop – but they didn’t use just that word.”

Her bricks didn’t pass any of the tests. They collapsed under the weights and dissolved in water like sugar. But that didn’t really matter. As her teacher said, this exercise was all about process. And, besides, my daughter had fun.

Nevertheless, I did ask her if it was even remotely possible that in the dusk she had inadvertently gathered a little dog poop in with her dirt. She said it was highly unlikely, but perhaps there was a small chance. And so the lesson she learned from this assignment? Well, there were two.

It’s not likely the pyramids are made of corn starch.

And, just in case, we better buy some new bread pans.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press, January 15, 2006.)

A lot of people have asked me over the last two weeks what I think of author James Frey's revelations that he made up sizable parts of what he claimed was his memoir, "A Million Little Pieces." They're asking me in part because I'm both a novelist (fiction) and a columnist (nonfiction), and in part because they want to know what sorts of things a person can make up, claim really happened, and then put in a book and make a mint.

Frey did make a fortune. "A Million Little Pieces" was the second best-selling title in 2005, outselling every book but "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince," (a book that is all true except for that hogwash about the mistreatment young Mr. Potter endured at the hands of the Dursleys. I know the Dursleys, and I can assure you that J.K. Rowling sensationalized Harry's relationship with the family to sell books).

Moreover, Frey is only part of a larger trend: The blurring between fact and fiction, and the license that some writers feel they may take with their stories.

So, here's my advice.

Do not fabricate anything that should leave a paper trail. Reporters can easily check whether you actually flew the space shuttle or played center for the Boston Celtics. It is much more difficult for us to determine whether you slept with Mick Jagger.

If you want to claim responsibility for criminal actions, don't even hint you were busted. It's one thing to imply that your glass of Chardonnay every night before dinner eventually transformed you into a writhing crack addict with nary a shred of self-respect; it's another to suggest that your alleged crack addiction led you to sell your 2005 BMW to an undercover police officer for a crack pipe and two rocks.

Avoid tales that will have obvious witnesses -- or, at least, witnesses who spend most of their lives sober. It's easy to bring down the memoirist who claims she once lectured at Yale. Or was an official "American Idol." And while there might be witnesses if you slept with an aging but still (apparently) charismatic rock star, your word is going to be as good as theirs.

I hope that helps.

Now, I know some people don't see what Frey did as a major crime. It probably isn't. Certainly it's not up there with, say, actually selling crack cocaine to elementary school children.

But I also believe that he violated the trust of his editors, his readers, and (yes) Oprah Winfrey.

When something is called a memoir, we presume it's true. Or at least as true as memory allows a writer. It might not be as accurate as a copiously researched history of the First World War, but if a writer says he knew Winston Churchill, we believe him.

My columns are nonfiction, and two weeks ago, I wrote about a wonderful woman named Wanda Goodyear who passed away in Lincoln on New Year's Day. Imagine if you were to discover that the woman never existed. I just made her up and eulogized her to wring a tear or two from your eyes and fill my weekly 675 words.

I'd be pretty snarky. And you'd feel pretty used.

Or view it the other way: Imagine if I tried to pass off parts of my novels as "real." Or "based on a true story." I can't tell you how many movie producers have asked me over the years whether one of my books was based on a true story. OK, I can. A lot.

Some folks, I know, argue that it doesn't matter if memoirists embellish their stories if they are getting at great universal truths. I don't agree. The goal is to get at those great universal truths either with fiction so authentic and precise that we suspend our disbelief and are genuinely moved, or with a real story. One that really happened.

It's a little more difficult, of course. But honesty usually is.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press, January 22, 2006.)

First, a disclaimer: I am happy to discuss the degrading experiences that mark my life as a novelist on the road. Book tour, I've noted, is a term that may have been coined by Inquisition torturer Torquemada when he was trying to find a slower, more subtle form of torment than either the rack or the iron maiden.

I am less comfortable discussing the craft of writing, however, because it suggests a great deal more premeditation on my part than usually occurs. A lot of what I do — and this is especially true after nine published novels and two impressively bad unpublished ones — is muscle memory and instinct. Moreover, some writers (not all) make me squirm for both them and their audience when they speak in great stentorian tones about voice and authenticity and linear momentum. (Okay, I confess: I, too, have used all three terms.)

That point noted, I think it is downright inspiring in this era of digitally-driven non-fiction — blogs and podcasts and good old-fashioned websites — that there is anyone out there at all who is still interested in reading and writing fiction. So, thank you.

Whenever I discuss the process of writing, there is one question that readers and aspiring writers alike ask me more frequently than any other: “How did you write your novel, ‘Midwives,’ in the voice of a woman?” The novel is structured like a memoir: A 30-year-old female ob-gyn is chronicling the summer when her mother, a midwife, was tried for manslaughter after one of her mothers died in a home birth that went tragically wrong. The narrator was 14 at the time of the trial and is recounting this event with both the wisdom and wistfulness of adulthood.

On one level, the question is pretty basic: How did a balding, middle-aged guy get anything at all right from the perspective of a woman?

On another level, however, the question gets to the heart of the most important decision novelists make before they embark upon a book: Is this novel going to be written in the first or third-person? (There are second-person novels as well, such as Jay McInerney's "Bright Lights, Big City," but the vast majority of novels are written in the first and third-person.) The late John Gardner elegantly outlined the advantages and disadvantages to both in his spectacularly clear and helpful guide for young writers, "The Art of Fiction." Essentially it comes down to this:

· First-person offers an idiosyncratic voice and great intimacy. But it also limits just how much knowledge novelists can share with their readers, because they can only offer the information their narrator can know at the time.

· Third-person allows novelists to jump in and out of any character's head whenever they want, but it may feel more emotionally distant than first person. Moreover, the omniscient narrator probably won't have a voice that is especially eccentric.

Writing 'Midwives' in the first person offered precisely those advantages, while forcing me to solve problems directly attributable to the limitations of having but one perspective. The narrator's name is Connie, and here is how the novel opens:

Throughout the long summer before my mother's trial began, and then during those crisp days in the fall when her life was paraded publicly before the county - her character lynched, her wisdom impugned - I overheard much more than my parents realized, and I understood more than they would have liked.

The first-person helps to humanize Connie and make her more accessible. We know that whatever crucible looms before her and her mother, we will be hearing the tale directly from the daughter herself. The third person would have made Connie a step removed from her readers, because there would have been the intermediary of the storyteller in between.

Of course, the first person also meant that readers could never know precisely what the lawyers or jurors are thinking. Or Connie's father. Or, most of the time, Connie's mother, a midwife named Sibyl.

Notice I said most of the time. There were points in the novel when it seemed critical to allow readers an insight into what Sibyl was experiencing. The solution? Diary entries. "Midwives" is told largely from the perspective of Connie, but I made Sibyl an inveterate diary writer so there could be moments when we can know what she is feeling, too.

My novels are pretty organic creations, which is part of the pleasure for me of writing them. I seldom know where they're going. Sibyl's diaries, for instance, did not begin as an important part of the plot - but they would become one.

And so while I may write without a road map, I never embark on the journey without knowing precisely whether the tale, whatever it is, will best be served by a first or third-person driver.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press, January 24, 2006. You can also read readers' reactions to it at http://www.youngwritersproject.org/ywp17c.htm .)

"Smelly cat, smelly cat

What are they feeding you?"

-- Phoebe Buffay (a.k.a., Lisa Kudrow on "Friends")

The other day my wife noticed that my winter boots smelled a lot like a litter box. This is noteworthy because at the time my wife made this observation, I was in the process of putting the boots on my feet.

"They do," I agreed. "I think one of the cats sprayed them."

She gave me the sort of look that mothers give their sons when they realize their little boy has just carved up the neighbors and put them in the freezer. She couldn't believe that I was going to wear them. But I explained to her that:

They were dry.

It was January.

Moreover, these were the most comfortable winter boots I had ever owned, and they were broken in perfectly. I figured that the pungent aroma of sandbox would go away after a few days.

Well, I was wrong. The smell, if anything, got worse. A professional wrestler could have built a whole character around the boots: The Urinator, maybe. Or the Big Yellow Mist. I tried washing them, but the odor was infinitely more powerful than soap and water. And detergent. And bleach. Like the cockroach, this stench was going to survive a nuclear holocaust.

But -- and this was no small point -- as long as I was actually wearing the boots and had them tied tightly around my ankles, the serious stink was largely contained. The laces seemed to act like a cork. And so I continued to wear them, and they continued to keep my feet cozy and warm.

Sure, there were small problems. My wife asked me to store the boots outside on the porch when I wasn't wearing them because otherwise the aroma tended to waft like mustard gas from the coat closet through every room in the house. This wasn't just any spray that had soaked into the shoes: Apparently one of our cats was in reality a superhero crime-fighting feline who used his powerful scent to disable evildoers.

Either that or the cat was secretly a skunk.

In any case, placing the boots outside meant that I had to thaw them out before I dared put them on my feet.

I also noticed that sometimes while I was chatting with people on the sidewalk in Bristol -- and one time in the Bristol Bakery itself -- folks sniffed uncomfortably around me. But I simply looked at them and inhaled companionably, almost conspiratorially. I tried to suggest with my sniff that I smelled it, too, and whatever it was clearly had nothing to do with either of us.

I figured I could probably get another winter out of those boots. But then, alas, I met some friends one Saturday afternoon at the Dobra Tea House in Burlington. They had commandeered one of the Dobra's elegant rooms behind beaded curtains where you sit on pillows on the floor ... after removing your shoes. I knew I was in trouble. Not only was I going to have to uncork the boots and -- like Pandora -- set free the pain and sorrow and misery that afflicts all humanity, I was also going to be sitting at ground level with the boots. Was it really that bad? It was. I tried to suggest that the tea was especially acrid, but I was fooling no one. There is no tea on even the Dobra's extensive menu that smells like a litter box.

And so, alas, the next time you see me on the street, my feet will be ensconced inside new boots. I doubt they will be as comfortable as my old ones, but at least my wife will let me keep them indoors when I'm not wearing them.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press, January 29, 2006.)