The Maplewoods Mirror

"Old Age isn’t for sissies,” Betty Davis once quipped. I’m now seeing this in family and friends. One friend in his early seventies has spinal stenosis, which is where a pad between two vertebrae has shrunk, putting pressure on the spinal cord. My friend used to play handball and exercise often and now propels himself with a walker. He will soon require surgery. Another friend in his fifties who I have skied with had to get a knee replacement. Parents of many of my friends are now going off to nursing homes. My mother, who had open-heart surgery in September, is still recovering. Why do the Golden Years seem so foreign to me?

It’s my mother in Minnesota who I think about daily. When I had visited her in January, she’d lost 35 pounds over the previous four months. She wasn’t a large person to begin with, and now she was looking like Karen Carpenter. She said she’d been feeling nauseated—that the feeling would come sharply throughout the day, most acutely after she ate. Hence, she didn’t like to eat.

I accompanied her to her doctor, who then looked up the side effects of each of her drugs. Three had nausea as a side effect. He stopped those medications, and about two weeks later, Mom’s nausea disappeared. Still, she didn’t like eating. She also still didn’t like being with people or talking on the phone. She’d always been a people person, very social, so her wanting isolation seemed so strange to me. My brothers and I now found she’d talk with each of us for only a few minutes at a time. Could a person’s personality change so radically?

Luckily earlier this month, she recognized that she needed more help than her health aide, her four sons, three daughters-in-law, and her once-a-week nurse could give her, and she checked herself into an intensive rehab unit. Within one week, she felt lifted from a fog and had become talkative again. Part of it was regulating her drugs carefully, and the other part was getting exercise and food. Now she was reengaging with the world again.

That place was only meant to be temporary, so she’s now checked herself into a residential home where she can continue physical therapy and keep getting help with her meds and eating. Until September, she had read voraciously, often a book a day. After she had left the Mayo Clinic and returned home, she had no concentration. That had frustrated her and made her edgier. Her new doctor says she’ll likely be able to read and watch television again.

So this is a good sign. Still, I had never imagined my mother would have such difficulties. I hadn’t imagined her anxious, popping Ativan like M&Ms. I pictured her more like Katherine Hepburn, swimming into her nineties and perhaps reflecting on a golden pond, “The loons! The loons! They’re welcoming us back.”

For years my mother has mentioned that she had long-term disability insurance that would even pay for 24-hour at-home nursing. Now that she was going to this residential home, my brother found her policy. He read it. The insurance will cover up to a whopping $40 a day for her care. You can’t even get a Motel 6 for that anymore. It might cover the cost of Q-Tips in a day.

Before my mother selected her residential home, my brother quickly checked out a list of facilities that a nurse had given him. He drove to each one. He discovered three types: 1) Those that Medicare will pay for. The residents tended to be zoned-out people in wheelchairs parked with others in wheelchairs blankly staring at a TV, and there were not a lot of nurses. He didn’t want that for Mom. 2) For about $250 a day, you get a higher class home with a few more nurses, and each resident has more control of his or her day. There’s good food, but still not a lot to do. 3) For around $100,000 a year, you can get a private room with your own bathroom, lots of staff, physical therapy, art therapy, and life is good—even though a number of residents seem to have succumbed to dementia. Being rich won’t necessarily keep you whole.

Because it’s for a short time, my mother is using her savings to go to the last type. Once she’s back on course, she’ll return home with hopes of controlling her meds and staying engaged.

All this has reminded me of when I volunteered in college to work in a nursing home for a day. I received credit for my psychology class. The nursing home was in downtown Denver, and the place looked much like a hospital without a large staff. People were booked two to a room, and there were not a lot of personal things on the bureaus or walls of the rooms. Most of the residents during the day had to stay in the large day room where each resident could have one cigarette per hour.

I remember them all in that room, some watching TV, others staring at the floor. I came in with my smile and sense I could change the world. All they wanted from me, though, was a cigarette. Every few minutes one or another would ask me if I could get them their cigarette. I didn’t smoke. I told them a staff member would bring them their cigarette.

I would try talking with some of them, but they mostly wanted to know how long until their cigarette? At the top of the hour, an orderly would come in and pass out Old Golds with filters. The residents were all blissfully quiet as they smoked for a few minutes, and I coughed. Nowadays, there’s no smoking, so I wonder what they do? Of course, those people are long gone.

In those days, I saw no connection in myself to them whatsoever. I probably didn’t even imagine I’d ever get that old. College kids didn’t age; they bonged.

I also remember thinking they got there from leading a less-than-stellar life. Not only did they smoke, but they probably didn’t save money or raise a family so that they’d have sons or daughters who’d take care of them. Somehow, this would never be me.

In fact, if I’d ever considered where I’d be in fifty years, I probably had a notion that I’d have dinner and drinks at a Country Club, meet with my old college buddies for snooker, whatever that was, and check on my stock portfolio.

The ironic thing is don’t have much of a stock portfolio now. What there is, my sister the stockbroker oversees. The downside to not being a tenured professor but to flying the freeways is that you get paltry retirement packages if anything.

My plan until now has been to keep writing until I drop. And keep teaching. It worked for many of the founding faculty at CalArts. Founding deans Alexander Mackendrick (1912-1993) and Mel Powell (1923-1998) for instance, each had trouble walking so bought electric carts and were engaged with their students until weeks before they died.

Jules Engle, my friend who had started the animation department at CalArts, hated talking about aging and never saw himself as old—and he never would give his age. He loved helping students, and he did so until the end. It turned out he was 94 when he died.

Aging and writing seems to be working for John Updike, and it did for Norman Mailer. Or perhaps I can simply become quirky and colorful like Norman Thayer in On Golden Pond. I’m practicing my lines now: “’Ethel Thayer.’ It sounds like I'm lisping, doesn't it?”

Blake School, Hopkins, Minnesota, in January

THE WRITER'S WORKOUT: Techniques For Stronger Writing

Twice a year for six weeks each, I teach a class in creative writing for UCLA Extension at Occidental College in Eagle Rock. Occidental is gorgeous, the parking is free, and the class, fun and affordable.

My next class, “The Writer’s Workout,” starts April 1. Much in the way artists take life-drawing classes to grow and keep in form, this course is designed to get you writing quickly and intensively in either fiction or narrative nonfiction forms. The Writer's Workout leads you through a series of exercises that strengthen your writing abilities, challenge you to achieve your goals, and perhaps even encourage you to set higher ones. It provides an honest yet supportive forum for your work as you learn to express ideas and emotions with greater clarity. You read and write, write, write--coming up with more stories and story elements than you might ever have thought possible in a short time.

To sign up for it or any upcoming UCLA Extension class, click here. If you live outside of Los Angeles, be sure to click on “Online Classes.” I’ve taken some of them (yes, as a student—at my age), and people in my classes have been from such places as Spain, Brazil, England, and Iowa. (People live in Iowa.) One of the secrets of aging is to stay engaged. Follow your bliss. Write.

New York City

THE AWP

Conventions are akin to a state fair or dental surgery. They seem a good idea at the time, but after a short while, you don’t want to be there.

I was once elected as a delegate to the Modern Language Association, whose mission to help professors and students of English and modern languages I applaud. Yet their convention was filled with professors and students of English and modern languages. While I’m one of those, I’m sorry, but if you get enough of us in one spot, the fusion of so much arrogance and patches on the elbows is enough to vaporize Twinkies.

Additionally, most seminar meetings didn’t interest me, events such as “Constructing Identity Through the Narrative of Self,” “The Interdisciplinarity of Composition and Rhetoric,” and “Caucerian Objects.” For my first MLA Convention, I had searched through the topics of nearly a thousand meetings and came up with three that interested me, all to do with playwright Harold Pinter. (Those Pinter people are a happy fun bunch, I must say.)

The yearly AWP Convention, however, is a different story. It’s a convention for creative writers and those who teach creative writing. AWP stands for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, and for your $65 yearly due ($40 for students), you get a lot besides the convention. You get the Writer’s Chronicle (http://www.awpwriter.org/magazine/index.htm ) six times a year, which has articles on writers and writing. You also get a continuous listing of jobs in writing and teaching, and access to career services.

The convention has been the only one I’ve ever enjoyed. This year is was in New York City split between the Sheraton and Hilton Hotels in Midtown. Once the nearly 400 seminars and readings were listed for the four-day event, I pored over the possibilities. I had to miss the first day so I could teach my class at USC, but I took a 6 a.m. flight eastward, and made it to the keynote address that night by John Irving.

John Irving

John Irving (from the University of New Hampshire Magazine)

Irving spoke about his propensity to plot. “As a writer, I’ve always had a plot. Unfailingly, I follow a plan,” he said, adding that he always starts with the last line. He loves a great last line, so that’s first, and out of twelve novels he’s written, ten of them have kept his initially planned last line. The last line of A Widow for One Year is “‘Don’t cry, honey,’ Marion told her only daughter. ‘It’s just Eddie and me.’”

I’ve always been a fan of his and have taught his books The Fourth Hand and A Widow for One Year in my English classes. What’s fun is that while his books are long, my students tend to get caught up in them and read ahead.

“Almost everything in my novels is foreshadowed,” Irving told his audience, “but it’s easy to understand when the plot is worked out.”

When he explained plot, he was clear that he worked out the major turns from the end to the beginning. “There are no coincidences in my novels because everything is formally planned.” That doesn’t mean he doesn’t surprise himself. He thought the protagonist in The World According to Garp was Jenny, Garp’s mother, until he was halfway through the book and Garp’s character took over. Things happen that he doesn’t plan, but even so, they don’t take him off his main course.

Irving read from his novel-in-progress, Last Night in Twisted River, about a cook and his son in a logging camp. It’s great so far.

To read a profile on him, click here.

For a funny interview with Irving by Jon Stewart, click here.

Robert Olen Butler

“Find the deep yearnings in your characters,” said Robert Olen Butler, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his collection of short stories, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, about Vietnam. “It’s not the same thing as having problems. Give them yearning.”

He then read from his new collection of short stories, Intercourse. The short-short stories in this volume come in pairs, often a famous couple, while in the act of making love. For instance, he read the stories of Pat and Richard Nixon. Dick yearns for his mother, so before sex, Dick has Pat dress in an overcoat like his mother always used to wear. Pat yearns for Dick to stop playing games and see who she really is.

Butler also read stories of John-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvior and an anonymous New York couple trying to make love the day after 9/11. His previous collection, Severance, contained 62 short-shorts from the point of view of a beheaded figure, often historical or mythical. Both collections are fabulous.

Alan Cheuse

The high point of the convention for me is when I came across Alan Cheuse, author and NPR book critic, who was signing his new book, The Fires. On NPR, his deep voice wraps around the books he reviews. He’s not on the air to chop people down, but rather to spread the excitement of stories, particularly great ones. He clearly loves books. He teaches writing at George Mason University.

I bought his book, and he asked who to sign it for. I said, "Christopher Meeks," and he looked up at me and said, "Why is that name so familiar?"

"I sent you my last book, The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea, two years ago for possible review."

He said, "I read it. I liked it very much. You're an accomplished writer.”

“You read it?” I said, happy and astounded.

“I did. It was great.” He inscribed my book, “For Christopher, with thanks for his own work—and with hope of good reading and writing.”

I asked if I could send him a copy of my new book. He said absolutely. After we chatted about Los Angeles, I walked away grinning.

Walter Mosley

As I was going to find a seat, giddy from meeting Alan Cheuse, I noticed one of the five people standing in the room was Walter Mosley, whose book The Devil in a Blue Dress I loved as I did the movie with Denzel Washington and Don Cheadle.

Mosley had given the keynote address at the AWP Convention in Austin two years earlier where he spoke about the importance of prose writers learning the tools of the poets. He’d said in his address, “As writers we learn and strive for a snake dance. We touch the truth, run our fingers along its sinuous belly, excite our readers with a fleeting glimpse of its scales or fangs, its alien beauty and the possibilities and dangers it represents. Nothing is more important than this dance.”

This dance comes from understanding poetry, which I had to become immersed in when I started teaching Introduction to Literature at Santa Monica College. Mosley says, “Take a poetry workshop. You need to study poetry to be a good fiction writer. You will learn everything about writing except story and plot.”

So I introduced myself to Mosley, we talked a little, and I asked him, too, if I could send him my new book. He said yes and told me how. I was on a roll.

A great interview with Mosley is on NPR at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1192760

Russell Banks and William Kennedy

Russell Banks (left) and William Kennedy

Russell Banks' sixteen novels include Affliction, The Sweet Hereafter, and Rule of the Bone. He has been installed at the New York State Author. William Kennedy’s novel Ironweed [1983], won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and he’s won a MacArthur “genius” Fellowship. Both writers were at the convention to talk about the importance of setting in writing.

“Write about places you know, particularly if they have an emotional connection,” said Kennedy, who is best known for his stories that take place in Albany, New York.

“Think of it as walking your beat,” said Russell. “To you, a place may be just a place, but the truth of it will emerge in your writing.” Russell’s stories often take place in New Hampshire or in Lake Placid, New York.

For an interesting interview where Russell Banks talks about setting, click here.

To read a great interview with William Kennedy, click here.

Charles Baxter

Graywolf Press showed off its new “Art of” series, which is where I saw Charles Baxter. His Feast of Love I used to give away because I liked it so much, and his new book is The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot.

Baxter said he wanted to write this book because he noticed often that beginning writers practice conflict avoidance. While conflict is the motor for most stories, we spend so much time avoiding conflict in our real lives that the same thing seeps into one’s writing. In my own students’ work, a common thing to happen is that they lead into what looks to be an explosive scene. Then there’s a break and a jump ahead to where the characters are hugging again, and we’re told after their anger, they now love each other. But we didn’t see much of the anger. Conflict avoidance. The trick is to let yourself dive into the conflict.

The Art of Subtext goes into much more than that, so I’ll read it soon.

Before the convention, I happened to learn that Baxter had gone to my high school, Blake, in Hopkins, Minnesota, graduating seven years before I had, so after he spoke at the convention, I approached him and introduced myself. He’s quite personable, and we reminisced about how Blake was before the school became coed. (It’s probably more fun now.) He now teaches at the University of Minnesota.

There are many interviews with Baxter on the internet, but my favorite one so far is from eleven years ago from The Atlantic before he was well known. Click here for the interview.

In the interview, Baxter underscores what I believe—that the arts in America are supported mostly thanks to colleges and universities. Mel Powell told me after he’d won a Pulitzer Prize in Music that if it weren’t for his teaching at CalArts, how else could he think about and write music? Baxter says, “Universities are the only institutions that have shown any interest in preserving a literary culture in our time.”

Because I was alone and early, I had found a seat up front, and I sat next to a woman who introduced herself as Jean Marie Hazelton, who mentioned she was studying writing at Stony Brook Southampton. As I was about to leave, Jean handed me an invitation to a party at 7 p.m. in one of the suites for the Stony Brook Southampton party, right after the reading by memorist Frank McCourt (Angela’s Ashes) and poet Billy Collins. Both to them are on Southampton’s faculty, which also includes playwrights Christopher Durang and Marsha Norman, actor and screenwriter Alan Alda, and novelists Melissa Bank, Meg Wolitzer, and Ursula Hegi. It turned out to be the best party of the convention.

The Stony Brook Southampton Party

Many of the parties at the convention are advertised and open to convention goers, but I found in the past that the food was minimal if at all; the bar required cash—$10 per drink—and then I’d know no one. In fact, on my first night, I went to one such party sponsored by ASU’s creative writing program. My son attends ASU, so that seemed like an affiliation. I knew nobody besides my friend James Jordan, who I went there with, and we felt silly after one drink and left.

The next night, James brought me to a private party sponsored by One Story review. It was in the Village at a bar called Pianos, and we had an adventure getting there in the rain. No cabs were to be had, so we figured out the subway system. It was a great party where I met James’ friends Suzanne and Pierre, also writers. Thus, I also got to see a new part of the city. The food and drinks were expensive, but, heck, it’s New York, and the conversation was electric.

The next night, the Frank McCourt/Billy Collins reading was packed—hundreds jammed into a ballroom—and the reception afterwards was to celebrate the readers as well as the premiere issue of The Southampton Review. The party was open by invitation only, so I’d lucked out getting one from Jean Hazelton. I brought my friend James and his friends Pierre and Suzanne, and we were one of the first ones there.

I found Frank McCourt standing by himself, and so I introduced myself. My wife Ann, daughter Ellen, and I had visited Ireland in 2006, and our first stop there had been in McCourt’s city of Limerick. Thus, I spoke fondly of Limerick and Ireland, but also mentioned I hadn’t been prepared for all the new building, much of it in stucco than reminded me of California. McCourt said Ireland’s economy was the strongest in Europe.

Frank McCourt

That evening, I also met Jules Feiffer, whose play, Feiffer’s People, had featured my friend Michael Moore. His play Little Murders had been turned into a film with Elliot Gould, and his screenplay Carnal Knowledge was directed by Mike Nichols and featured Jack Nicholson, Arthur Garfunkel, Candice Bergen and Ann-Margret. He also penned cartoons for the Village Voice for 42 years.

I simply enjoyed the party—great food, free drinks, and interesting conversation. Copies of the Southampton Review were everywhere, and I look forward to reading it.

A Tribute to Richard Yates

I didn’t know Richard Yates when he taught at the Master of Professional Writing Program at USC. I’d met him at one of the program’s parties, but Yates died in 1992, long before I started overseeing the USC One-Act Play Festival. David Scott Milton came to know him well, though, and David has spoken so highly of Yates’ short stories and Yates first novel, Revolutionary Road, that I bought The Collected Stories of Richard Yates. After I read a few of them, I realized how this man’s work was gold. So I went to the tribute.

The tribute’s panel featured many of his closest friends who admitted that when Yates drank, he was unbearable. When I had first used the Internet—and before the World Wide Web had become its interface—I’d been on a listserv that had once featured a raft of anti-Dick-Yates posts from his former students in Alabama. Apparently he was a terror in class—but not at USC when he’d stopped drinking.

For you Seinfeld fans, I recently learned a bit of trivia about the show. The character of Elaine Benes was based on Monica Yates, the daughter of gruff novelist Richard Yates. Larry David had dated Monica, and when he met her father, Larry was so intimidated by the elder writer, Larry ended up ruining his suede leather jacket in the snow. That incident later became an episode called “The Jacket.” (Click on the highlighted words to learn more.) Monica spoke at the tribute.

The tribute reminded me that some writers alienate their loved ones, yet turn out amazing writing. This is true of Ernest Hemmingway and Woody Allen.

All in all, the convention required stamina, but I left enriched—only to come down with the flu the next week. Next year’s convention is in Chicago.

A NEW AMAZON SHORT

I’m happy to say that Amazon.com accepted one of my new short stories, “The Holes in My Door” to feature in Amazon Shorts. If you haven’t discovered Amazon Shorts, it’s like iTunes for text, short essays and stories that cost only 49 cents. When you buy a Short, you can download it, have it e-mailed to you, or read it online whenever and forever. Once you buy it, it’s yours.

“The Holes in My Door” will be part of my new book, Months and Seasons, which comes out June 13^th. If you’re in Los Angeles, please save the date for a special reading at the Beverly Hills Library that night at 8 p.m.

To learn more about my new story, click here.

MPW Admissions

USC’s Master of Professional Writing Program is still taking applications for this fall. If you’re interested in applying, click here.

See you next time,

--Chris

"All good books have one thing in common - they are truer than if they had really happened." ~ Ernest Hemingway

For reviews or more information on either of my two books below, click on the cover.