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The
Maplewoods Mirror #29 - September 2008
Welcome to my monthly newsletter on life and
writing. If you want to see my website for past issues and other
news, please visit www.chrismeeks.com.
To see a three-minute video about my newly
published book, click here.
* * *
This marks the first time I’ve used a guest
writer for The Maplewoods Mirror. I used to teach with
screenwriter and poet Paula Brancato in USC’s Master of Professional
Writing Program. She now lives full time in New York City, and she
asked if she could write something for this newsletter.
I suggested she write about the Southampton
Writer’s Conference, which she taught in this summer. It’s a good
introduction to what writers conferences are. After all, USC is
likely to have its first one ever this coming June. If you’re a writer,
you might like to come to that one for a long weekend.
In This Issue
Robert Reeves, Director of MFA
in Creative Writing and Literature,
film critic Molly Haskell, film director Robert Benton, and Annette
Chandler,
Director of the Screenwriting
Conference (photo by Jean Hazelton)
The Southampton Writers Conference
By Paula Brancato
For the very first time, this year’s Stonybrook
Southampton Writers Conference included a week of screenwriting courses and
events. The 2008 Southampton Screenwriting Conference, which took
place from July 30 to August 3, featured faculty Karl Iglesias, Andrew
Bienan, Paula Brancato, Ken Friedman, Michael Hague, Christina Lazaridi,
Stephan Molton, Frank Pugliese, Linda Seger, and Malia Scotch Marmo.
I would like to say right here and now that I was honored, if not
outright shocked, to find my name in and among this list of very fine writers.
Southampton screenwriting
instructor Frank Pugliese (photo by Jean Hazelton)
Over fifty conference participants attended
five days of screenings, salon talks, and workshops. Writers from
beginner to advanced traveled from as far as Portugal and Italy, though
most were locals from New York and Long Island or visitors from Los
Angeles. Seminar topics ranged from “Writing the Romantic Comedy” to
“The Art of Adaptation” to “Breaking the Back of the Story,” and classes
took place in the calm and quiet mornings, with optional screenings in the
late evenings.
I held my classes outdoors under the shade of
the conference lunch tent under cloudless Long Island skies. In the
afternoons, students could take private sessions with other instructors,
tour the Southampton mansion circuit by car or bike, or head for those
magnificent, wild Southampton beaches, to this writer’s mind, the best in
the U.S.
Pecone Bay, Southampton (photo
by Jean Hazelton)
On one such sunny afternoon, I managed to
corner Andrew Bienan (screenwriter, Boys Don’t Cry) on Cooper’s
Beach. Combing for seashells, we discovered we both grew up in
Queens, New York, in a neighborhood of low-income Roman Catholics and Jews
in the late 60’s early 70’s. We talked about the effect of community
on our writing. Is it possible to write what you did not come
from? Is it possible to write anything that does not reflect who you
are, how you grew up in some way, if only the cadence of the language?
Andrew admitted he’d recently taken up short
story writing. It’s not surprising, as a screenplay is about the
length of a good short story. Both mediums are time compressed, which
makes it difficult to develop plot, tone, mood, and, especially, character.
“How do you know,” asked Andrew, “when to
narrate and when to breakout into a scene? When do you go into a
character’s head and when not?” These were difficult questions. Just
that morning I had been waxing eloquent about tone vs. mood. “What is
the difference between tone and mood, anyway?” asked Andrew.
I looked out over the wide blue ocean.
“Well, the tone is like the music, and mood is like the emotion,” I
said. Andrew looked perplexed. I tried again to explain what perhaps
is impossible to explain, but for me, as a writer, everything has to do
with “voice,” with putting myself into a project, which was what we had
been discussing in a more pointed way before.
“You know that song by Sheryl Crowe?” I
said. “The one about Hollywood Boulevard?” He nodded.
“You know how the music is upbeat and lively? But have you even
listened to the lyrics? It’s about people who are drinking themselves
to death. If the tone were the same as the mood you’d have a funeral
dirge. No one would want to listen. But the tone is so upbeat,
it lets the artist go wherever she wants to go and allows us to
follow.”
“So you don’t want the tone and the mood the
same?” he said.
“Well, no,” I searched my sun-addled
brain. “Sometimes you do. Like for comic effect or… or in
melodrama. I don’t mean that in a bad way. Melodrama is good
too. There are some really great classic melodramas.”
Like?”
I was completely at a loss. An hour or
two into it, we had more questions than answers when, savaged by the sun,
we broke down, sat under the wings of the confection stand, and ordered up
ice creams.
Screenwriting instructors Linda
Seger and Paula Brancato (photo by Jean Hazelton)
Evening programs included a Q&A session
with luminary Robert Benton (scribe of Kramer Vs. Kramer, Places In The
Heart, Bonnie And Clyde). Asked what most attributed to his
success, Mr. Benton said “Failure.” This was particularly poignant
for me, not just because I am always failing, but also because my mentor
Phil Schultz won the Pulitzer this year for his book of poems, aptly
entitled “Failure.” If you have not read it, please do. The
title poem is a knock-out.
Saturday night closed with a moving tribute to
producer Alan Pakula with scenes from his films (Klute, The Pelican
Brief, Sophie’s Choice, Up The Down Staircase and more) plus a
hilarious, off-the-cuff performance by his closest friend who is a talented
actor. I cannot recall precisely what the man said, nor do I recall
his name. One could not help but laugh as he shuffled across the
stage, milking it, his age I mean, to take his place beside Mr.
Benton.
Plopping down in his chair, he murmured to
himself, pulled out three folded sheets of yellow ruled paper (on which I
am sure he had not written even one line) and proceeded to “read” his
tribute, perfectly timed, just this side of plausible, full of precisely
delivered imperfections, while proclaiming he suffered from total lack of
recall. Eighty-plus-year-old Mr. Benton just about split a gut
filling in the blanks. It was a wonderful time.
It was said that later that night, at the
conference’s close, you could find one or all of the faculty around the
piano at the Southampton Inn, displaying their musical accomplishments.
Next summer, I expect to lure them to stand-up comedy at an open mike—maybe
in the city. Maybe at PJ Clarke’s or some naught hip establishment I can
learn about from some twenty-something year-old. Move over Woody
Allen.
***
Lakewood Cemetery, Minneapolis,
Minnesota
Graveyards
My cousin Stanley has a hobby I’d never heard
of. It’s not unlike Six Degrees of Separation, but he goes
over the family tree and finds people we’re connected to, and he uses those
people to find connections to other people he suspects we’re distantly
related to, people I’d never think of, such as Humphrey Bogart and even
Princess Diana.
He's a relative, it turns out
Once he finds connections, real, actual
connections and often aided in proof by a group of like-minded
genealogists, Stan then travels to our newly discovered relatives’
graveyards and photographs their tombstones or markers. It’s quite
fascinating, actually. He sent me a whole CD of graveyard delights.
I suggested he should see if we’re related to
Abraham Lincoln. He said Lincoln’s line died out a while ago, but I
wondered what if he could go back enough generations and find a side
connection? Heck, maybe then we could sleep in the Lincoln bedroom at
the White House.
Time magazine recently wrote
that Barack Obama is distantly related to both Vice President Dick Cheney
and President George W. Bush. The New England Historic Genealogical
Society also shows Obama is related to Brad Pitt, Hilary Clinton, and John
McCain, so what I’m saying about my distant relations is no miracle.
This brings me to my mother. When I was
in Minneapolis recently, my mother couldn’t take visits for long.
After about fifteen minutes, she’d thank us for coming. I then
realized it was her talking that did her in. With emphysema, if she
talks for fifteen minutes, she uses up a lot of lung power. The next
day, I suggested we take a drive instead of talk in the living room.
She liked that idea. As we drove around Lake Calhoun, I noticed that
a graveyard swept down from a hill and went almost to the lake. She
said that was Lakewood Cemetery.
I knew the place. It’s where my
grandparents, aunts and uncle are buried and where my mother will likely go
someday. “Could we drive in?” said my mother. “I’d like to
visit my mother.”
Lakewood Cemetery is hilly, green, and
bucolic. It has roads that branch off, built like a maze. My
mother remembered what mausoleum to turn at, what hill to go up, until we
found the Washburn marker. My great grandfather, John Washburn,
started General Mills—not that it gets me a free sleepover anywhere or even
a box of Cheerios.
John Washburn helped found Lakewood Cemetery,
and there’s a big marble square with a Washburn cross on it, beneath which
he, his wife, three daughters, and their children are buried.
John Washburn only had daughters, so my
grandmother’s generation was the last of the Washburns, but there’s enough
room there for my mother and her siblings. My generation: we’ll have
to look elsewhere. Perhaps we’ll be ashes in the wind.
My grandmother's marker; my
mother is named after her
As a kid, I had thought I’d hate to be buried
when I died. It would hurt with worms boring into me. I heard
somewhere, too, that when you’re dead, your fingernails keep growing, and
what if I got a hangnail? It’d hurt for eternity.
Now I realize graveyards aren’t for the
dead. They’re for the living. Graveyards are a place to reflect
on the person you’re seeing in your mind as you stand amid trees and
flowers. A grave aids in the grieving process as well as, perhaps,
making sense of one’s short time on earth.
My relatives’ bodies aren’t under the
markers. It’s only their ashes. I come from a practical line of
people—urns take up less space. It’s only their minerals that are
underground. Still, as I watched my 78-year-old mother look at her
parents’ and siblings’ markers, I could see it gave her peace.
In the end, that’s what we want, right?
Peace.
Red Room
With over 200,000 new book titles receiving
ISBN numbers this year, that means there are nearly that many authors
trying to get attention. Imagine if there were 200,000 feature films
coming out each year. It's hard enough to make sense with the
few hundred we have.
Add to the publishing stew the fact
that the Los Angeles Times and many newspapers across the
country have cut the length and number of reviews they do each year, mainly
because ad revenue is not supporting book reviews. In our country,
there are probably more video game reviews and revenue than anything to do
with books—yet good books settle well on people’s souls. You carry in
your mind your favorite stories.
Thus, I entered the difficult marketplace with
my new book, Months and Seasons. I sold nearly 200 books the
first week after it was published on June 13. The next month I
received a sales report for that showed exactly zero books had been sold in
July. I needed to put my marketing hat back on. Authors today have to
be their own promoters.
The first thing I asked myself was HOW could I
get my book reviewed? At that point, I had four reviews, solid,
wonderful reviews, but my publicist had only landed one review in a
newspaper or journal, and that was the Midwest Review, which wrote,
“Poetry and short story collections are two of the hardest writing to sell.
With this collection Christopher Meeks proves there is an audience for
short stories. His characters are well defined with problems that they
can't resolve. There are twelve tales that reveal a lot about our present
society. Meeks's stories reminded me of those of John Cheever. —Gary Roen”
So how to build from there? First, I
realized that Jhumpa Lahiri’s new collection of short fiction, Unaccustomed
Earth, blew apart marketing truisms. Not only had Lahiri’s book
been on the New York Times bestseller list for weeks, but also the
book had won a major prize, the Frank O’Connor Award out of Ireland.
Few critics review short story
collections. That’s because short stories aren’t novels. I
figured, though, that a number of people must have reviewed Lahiri’s book,
so I researched who had. I found many, and I wrote to about thirty of
them who had literary websites, sites that showed a love of literature with
well-written reviews. In a short note, I explained my book, and I
included links to the reviews I’d received already.
This literary website, created
by critic Mayra Calvani, is a good example of a new
generation of reviewers.
To see her interview with me, click
here.
From those mailings, I received twenty-five
people who were interested in reviewing. Months and Seasons has
received nine more reviews so far, most of them utterly positive, and you
can read those reviews on my new author’s page at Red Room by clicking here.
Reviewer Rebecca
Schinsky created this site. She works for a major book
chain as a community liason and loves books. For her review of mine, click
here.
I learned about Red Room from two people.
My friend and fellow author Jessica
Barksdale Inclan, blogs there all the time. Then a reviewer had
urged me to join the site because “it’s where the authors are.” I
joined.
If you go visit my page, you’ll see how elegant
it appears—all thanks to the easy interface provided by Red Room.
Anyone can be a member of Red Room, which allows you to leave comments and,
if you chose, to create a member page where you can display your love of
books.
If you’re an author, you can have an author’s
page. To do so, go to the home page, www.redroom.com,
and click on “How to Become a Red Room Author” for more information.
You need to have published at least one book.
On my page, you’ll see if you scroll down, all
the book reviews and interviews I’ve had so far. More reviews will
come. People on another site, Library Thing (see below) have been
chatting about my book, too. Buzz is starting to build.
What amazes me most about Red Room is the
number of visitors I’ve had to my page. My page has been up only a
month, and I’ve told no one until now about it, yet there have been over
700 hits. Whether that makes August a better sales month than July,
I’ll find out in a few weeks.
Where my marketing will go, I don’t know.
Doing nothing clearly brings nothing. I’ve believed in my book, and now
others do, too. I like the community that’s building.
Dawn Rennert, another reviewer,
has written a few times about Months and Seasons. For her review, click
here. For a listing of all the reviews I've received so far, click
here.
Library Thing
It’s not just that I have a thing for libraries
and that I’m married to a librarian, but also I’ve discovered an
interesting literary site—almost as good as Red Room—called Library
Thing. I first heard of it when one of my book’s reviewers mentioned
that she put the review also on Library Thing (www.librarything.com).
When I Googled the words “Library Thing Christopher Meeks,” not only did I
find her review and a few others of my book, but as I noodled around, I
found that Months and Seasons was a topic of talk under “Talk” and
“Forum.”
Most recently, the wonderful reviewer Rebecca
Schinsky wrote in her Book Lady’s Blog, “I’ve been talking to
Christopher Meeks, author of Months
and Seasons, and trying to get him to join Library Thing and
participate in an author chat because I loved his book and want to spread
the word about it, but so far, no luck.”
That, of course, made me want to join Library
Thing. Before I did, I didn’t quite “get” what Library Thing
was. Why did people upload the covers of the books they own onto
Library Thing, for instance? People have so much time in their lives,
they can peek on on what other people have on their shelves? Thus, I
e-mailed Rebecca to ask her what was Library Thing?
She wrote back that Library Thing is “best
described as a cross between a social networking site for bibliophiles and
source of book reviews, recommendations, and cataloging. Many of the
users are bloggers (there is a Bloggers group), but not all of them are. It
was originally created to allow people to catalog and rate the books in
their personal libraries, to share those with others, and to receive
recommendations from readers with similar habits. Now that blogging
has taken off, that plays a role as well.
“The Early Reviewers program is
interesting. Publishers offer a limited number of selected titles,
and members of the ER group make requests. You just fill out a simple
form to become a reviewer (there's no application process, per se), and you
can request books. Whether you get a book, and which book you get,
are determined by an algorithm that looks at the books in your library, the
number of reviews you've written, and several other factors, including
random chance. You are expected to review the book in some capacity
(for many people, this means just posting a simple review in their LT
library), and if you fail to do so, it hurts your chances for receiving
books in the future.”
In other words, if you’re a particularly
voracious reviewer, you can get free books in advance on Library Thing if
you agree to review them.
While the Library Thing site isn’t as elegantly
designed as Red Room, some features are particularly easy to use. I
wasn’t going to show any of my library because I expected it’d be labor
intensive, but when I clicked on “Add Books,” I discovered how easy it
is—seconds per book. I typed in either the name of an author or a
book title, and in a column on the right, book covers appeared of various
editions and possibilities. I’d click on the version I had and,
voila, the book was added to my library. It’s rather fun and addictive.
I added 50 titles in no time.
Under each title I inserted, up would come how
many Library Thing members also had that same version of the book.
Thus, when I added Janet Fitch’s White Oleander, a book I’ve used
twice in my English classes to great enthusiasm, I saw that over ten
thousand LT members had that book. The same was true of Kurt
Vonnegut’s books, Alice Walker’s, and many well-known writers.
When I added Months and Seasons, I found
14 members had it—not bad considering my obscurity. Six people owned The
Middle-Aged Man and the Sea.
I found a few other books I adore that didn’t
get a large number of owners, so I’ll pitch them here. They should
have more readers. One is from my former professor and now colleague,
David Scott Milton. His The
Fat Lady Sings only received three hits on Library Thing.
It’s a dark and fascinating mystery about a
man, Paul Dogolov, who teaches writing to prisoners in the maximum-security
section of the Tehachapi prison in California. One of his students,
Travis Wells, makes a good case of why he is innocent of his murder
conviction, and as Dogolov, on a whim, starts researching the man’s case,
he becomes convinced Wells is innocent.
Dogolov becomes a detective and starts
interviewing people from Wells’ past, and the instructor unwittingly
unleashes a terrible storm of violence by other people. His own life
becomes at stake. This book is a rare combination of genres, literary
and mystery, not unlike books by Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett.
The Fat Lady Sings has
been optioned for a film, and it’s supposed to shoot later this year in the
South (even though the book’s setting is in California).
Zeroville
by Steve Erickson is a fabulously dark and funny book. It’s a
combination of Being There and The Day of the Locust, a story
about a seemingly simple man who finds himself landing in Los Angeles on
the day of the Manson murders and being picked up as a suspect. He’s
let go and over time ends up working in the film industry, noting all its
oddities and humor. While Erickson teaches at CalArts, I don’t know
him. He’s a talent to be sure. Zeroville received 88
hits on Library Thing, and I hope it goes into the thousands.
When I added Ransom
Seaborn by Bill Deasy, Library Thing showed no one else had
it. This is a crime. I first heard of Ransom Seaborn when
the POD-dy Mouth website gave it a Needle Award for the book’s high
quality. I used it in one of my English classes, where it was
popular.
It’s about a college freshman named Dan Finbar
who is struggling to find his proper place in Harrison College. He
befriends Ransom Seaborn, an odd young man consumed with reading J.D.
Salinger books, especially Catcher in the Rye. Perhaps because
I like Salinger so much—in fact, I’m rereading Catcher in the Rye
now when I found it for sale at a Minneapolis airport newsstand—I fell for
this book. Nonetheless, Deasy captures the lives of college-age
people brilliantly.
As you can see, there are good reasons to add
your library on Library Thing. You’ll find other people passionate
about the books you love. You can stay anonymous and/or make it easy
for people to e-mail you. To join Library Thing is simple. Go
to www.librarything.com.
In a form to the right, type in your name and a name you’d like to use on
the website, and you’re in.
And maybe I’ll have an author chat there soon.
From Obscure Books to Obscure Movies
In high school, college, and in my twenties, I
was always ahead of the technology curve. I was the first one I knew
to have quadraphonic sound in the seventies, the first to have a computer
(a Kapro II with a serial number just over 1,000) in the eighties, and a
cell phone in the nineties. These days, I feel more like Rip Van
Winkle.
I noticed that my wife’s People magazine
has a last page called “What TV Shows Do You Record?” We don’t
record. After I couldn’t figure out how to program our VCR or, later,
the DVR to use the VCR+ programming codes to record shows and movies in the
future, we gave up recording. Mostly we get movies on DVD.
Additionally, we’re still one of the dozen
people who go to Blockbuster to rent movies. We haven’t tried Netflix
yet. There’s something about seeing the movies in front of our faces
that’s appealing—plus we get out of the house. If it weren’t for that
and shopping for groceries, we might be hermits.
The last time we went to Blockbuster, it was
Ann’s turn to choose movies. We trade off. She thinks I choose
dark and intense movies—probably her feelings from when we were
dating. Then I had her watch most of the ten episodes of Kristof
Kieslowski’s mesmerizing if not bleak Decalogue as well as his three
masterwork films, Blue, White, and Red. If you haven’t
seen these works, think of Ingmar Bergman films, but peopled with
characters of deep empathy. For a taste of Kieslowski, see this
four-minute montage of scenes from Blue by clicking here.
At Blockbuster, Ann selected two films I hadn’t
heard of before: Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day with Frances
McDormand and Amy Adams (from Enchanted), and The Life Before Her
Eyes with Uma Thurman and Evan Rachel Ward (from Thirteen).
Wow. Why these were theatrically released in March and April
respectively, I don’t understand. Both are Academy Award-type films.
A comedy set in England just before World War
II, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day revolves around Miss Guinevere
Pettigrew (McDormand), a prim governess who keeps getting fired from her
jobs for speaking out when she questions her employers’ morality.
After all, Miss Pettigrew had a minister for a father, and her view of the
world has left her penniless after her last firing. She now eats in a
soup kitchen.
Desperate, she steals a referral from her
employment agency and pretends to be the agency’s choice for a job of
social secretary to a cabaret singer named Delysia Lafosse (Adams).
Miss Pettigrew is hired immediately and sees the real job is not to
question her employer’s loose lifestyle—Delysia is sleeping with and
stringing along three different men—but to guide Delysia toward a loving
relationship with the right man.
Frances McDormand and Amy Adams
in Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
Adam’s bubble-headed singer is on-the-edge
over-the-top, but Adams has such impeccable timing, and is so naively
gorgeous, it works. Think of Marilyn Monroe. When she sings, you’re
pulled in by the emotion.
McDormand’s character must work in an
environment where she has to stifle her moral outrage and simply help a
person in need. Miss Pettigrew knows the heart has to be true to itself.
In one particularly moving moment when she’s
talking about the previous war with Joe, a famous and older lingerie
designer (played by the Irish actor Ciarán Hinds), we learn she once was in
love, and her boyfriend was killed in action. She says, “He smiled
every time he saw me, and we could have built a life on that.” You
believe it.
What’s particularly satisfying is how so much
happens in a day, including Miss Pettigrew finding her own center.
This isn’t a major comedy, but a guilty pleasure where the cast and the
narrative threads twirl together to make you smile—and you can build a film
on that.
The Life Before Her Eyes plunks
you into the center of high school life where 17-year-old Diana McFee
(Woods) joins her best friend Maureen (Eva Amuri) in the girls’ room when
the sounds of gunfire are heard. “That’s Michael,” says Diana,
realizing. “He said he was going to kill people today.” Her
friend is shocked—why hadn’t Diana told anyone? Then Michael enters
the bathroom with a machine gun.
The story leaps forward in time to fifteen
years later. Diana (now Thurman) has survived the shooting but has
lost her friend. While she’s married to a professor (Sherman Alpert)
and has a daughter (Gabrielle Brennan) whose fierce personality is not
unlike Diana’s younger self, older Diana struggles to maintain
sanity. The 15th anniversary of the shooting weighs
heavily on her.
The film then cuts back and forth on visual and
well as audio transitions that show director Vadim Perlmann, who had made
his debut with the marvelous House of Sand and Fog, a master of the
medium. Some shots are so shockingly beautiful—flowers swaying,
crosses standing on a lawn, cotton-like seeds drifting on a breeze, clouds
in a sky—that one realizes how much beauty is around us daily if we only
looked.
Uma Thurman appears so emotionally vulnerable
throughout the film, she epitomizes the trauma that any tragedy
brings. She anchors the character of Diana, who, as we move back and
forth between time periods, has moved from fierceness to fear. The
ending, which may surprise, ends on a poetic note.
There’s a sense of Kieslowski or even Bergman
in this film. It occurs to me: Ann’s and my tastes are merging.
However, I still can’t sit through Plan 9 From Outer Space.
If you want to see trailers of either film, try
the following links.
For Miss Pettigrew, click here.
For The Life Before Her Eyes, click here.
Lake Minnetonka in Minnesota in
August
LINKS TO PAST ISSUES
If you missed the past issue or didn't see it
with photos, you can go to www.chrismeeks.com.
Scroll down to get the issue of the Maplewoods Mirror that you want.
The photos add a lot.
See you next time,
--Chris
For reviews or more
information on my books below, click on the cover.
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