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The
Maplewoods Mirror #32 - December 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. I also have an author site (click
here)
To see a three-minute video about my newly
published book, click here.
This is a short issue. It’s about mothers and
sons.
I’ll be going back to Minnesota in just over a
week to help prepare my mother’s house for sale in the spring.
My brothers and I expected we wouldn’t have to deal with this until
somewhere down the road. After all, our mother is stable and lives in
assisted living. Because it’s so expensive, though, she wants us to
sell her house.
So I’m writing more about her, below. I
also came across a fabulous personal essay by my friend Jessica Barksdale Inclan,
which I’m including here. Jessica writes about her oldest son, Mitchell,
now in his twenties. I came across her piece in her blog, and I thought
about it for days before I asked if I could include it in The Maplewoods
Mirror. She said go ahead.
I love the contrast of our two pieces, perfect
for the holidays, a time when people consider those they love. Happy
Hannukah, Merry Christmas, and cheers to anything else you celebrate.
Many thanks, too, to the support you’ve given
me in reading this newsletter and buying my books. My first novel
comes out in March. I’m still finalizing that release this month—a big
month.
May you have a grand month.
In This Issue
END OF LIFE
One of my pleasures is to read Jessica
Barksdale’s blog in Red Room, and her recent blog called “Time Out”
brought many comments. People related to Jessica’s past where she struggled
with anxiety and panic attacks, which had me thinking about my mother,
Sidney, who, at nearly eighty, is struggling with both things as well as
emphysema.
My mother has been not only a role model for
her four sons (I’m the oldest), but also for many women. She
graduated from Pembroke, the all-women's college attached to Brown
University, and then managed to be one of a few females to attend the
Harvard Business School for her MBA when the school opened up to women
on a trial basis in the early fifties. This was one of the few experiments
in equality at a time when men and women after WWII had been sucked
back into the old role models. Despite her master's degree, she
stayed home raising her children while her husband went off to work. It
didn't work. My parents divorced.
My mother tried living the
Norman Rockwell life with husband #2, but when my stepfather lost
his job in the early sixties, my mother realized not only did she have to
work, she wanted to work. She became an executive at Fingerhut, which made
a name for itself in catalog shopping. She moved on to become an executive
at Gold Bond Stamps. At both places, she was only female in the upper
strata, always dealing with men and their feelings that women shouldn't be
executives. She went on to be the circulation manager at Family
Handyman magazine, and she boosted its circulation tremendously.
My mother was driven and dynamic. She had
strong opinions on everything, be it politics (Barry Goldwater was
"the best") or what college I should go to (Brown, Yale, or
anywhere I wanted but "no cow colleges.") She taught herself how
to invest in the stock market, and even now, her decisions have been good
ones. She smoked and joked like the men she worked with. She had a
great career, but it took a lot of gender battling along the way, including
taking one of her employers to court.
My
mother in her executive days
As I've become older, I also realize a few
things about my upbringing. I grew up with three brothers, a
stepfather who loved having a cocktail with my mother each evening before
dinner, and a mother who worked all day cajoling and battling men—and appreciating their
humor often, based on the stories she told many nights. I sensed she
loved what she did.
This is why after her open-heart surgery last
year, when she woke up disappointed at being alive, that I came to meet a
new person. She found herself nervous about leaving the house, afraid to
talk to her friends or go to doctor appointments. The doctor prescribed her
Ativan for anxiety, to take as needed, and she needed it so often that she
had to go to a special clinic just to clean herself out and try a new
approach.
But how do you have a new approach when fifty
years of smoking have left you winded after walking down a hallway?
How do you have a new approach when everything you worked for—a custom
house and a lot of land that brought peace a place to garden—no longer
mattered?
My mother had never been prone to cry when I
grew up, yet earlier this year when I visited her in Minnesota and found
her so thin, she could cry at deciding what soup to have for the day. Where
did her personality go? She now lives in assisted living, mainly to
have 24-hour care for when she gets anxious and someone can get her to
relax and breathe slowly. She only talks on the phone five minutes at the
most before she feels out of breath.
This has left me more than puzzled. I'm someone
who, if not consciously believing in karma, somehow expected that if you
led a good life, your end-of-life would be good, too. Then again, an older
acquaintance of mine at CalArts years ago clearly had led a good life, yet
as I had lunch near her one day, she shot off her chair and had
some sort of seisure on the cafeteria floor. It turned out to be a
stroke. She never recovered full function again.
I'm not sure what else to say. I'm a bit adrift
right now. There are no rules.
LOOK AT HIM ON THE EDGE
By Jessica Barksdale Inclan
When my oldest son was eight-months-old and in
his walker and in a second of my inattention and mistake, he scooted onto
the landing of a flight of twenty-two concrete stairs that led down into
the dark basement floor of my mother’s house. There he was, looking
at me, smiling, his square walker firmly, for now, planted on the landing
and everything stopped, just like in the cliché, just like in the
movies.
I could see my life after that moment, after
the screaming and the dialing of 911, after the weeping and the blood would
come the disaster of blame and guilt. This gorgeous smiling amazing
baby would be gone, and it would be entirely my fault for the rest of time.
Forever I would see him as I actually still do, looking at me, eyes wide
and dark, waiting on the landing.
Later, when he was sixteen years old and frozen
in the almost coma called akinesia brought on by the repeated Haldol
injections he was given to allay his psychotic rantings from LSD, I
remembered him in his walker. But now, he wasn’t bright-eyed but
dead-eyed. They’d pumped him full of Benardyl to counteract the other
drug, and his father and I were waiting waiting waiting for him to come
back. It was the same feeling that I had while he was on the
landing. In a second, life could go one way or the other, toward the
light or the dark, but the dark seemed so much more possible.
I’ve never wept as hard as I did at the Kaiser
ER, and it was not just weeping but a kind of purging. I was trying
to get rid of all the mistakes I’d ever made with this boy, my choices that
had clearly backfired. As he lay there staring up at nothing, I
realized that the time and effort and organization and help and punishment
and discussions had not kept him from being right here, frozen on this gurney.
All the trips and classes and tutors and sports had led to this one
place.
Regardless of what I had done, he’d begun to
experiment with drugs, taking BART into Berkeley to visit the free clinic
so he could buy a clean needle. At sixteen, he bought heroin on his
own. At sixteen, he became addicted. At sixteen, he got himself
off heroin without anyone noticing. Without my noticing.
Without either his father or me seeing that he was on the landing at all.
Then he went into LSD, and this trip (not his
last, either) had brought him to this place where I knew that I had never
done one right thing for him. Not one.
We sat there with the monitors beeping and in
the cold, clinical air of the ER room. Finally, I noticed him looking
around, shifting slightly against the sheets, and I took his hand.
“You’re back?” I said.
He nodded, and I held his hand and my then
husband’s. With my son, in this, always, my husband and I were
together. One more time, this time, we had pulled him out of danger
after all.
I no longer can pull him back from the various
landings he slides himself onto. He likes the edge, and as he goes
into his life as an anarchist, living in abandoned homes, traveling to
Germany to pull up cobblestones and throw them at police, protesting the
war, breaking down barricades, I can’t lean far enough forward or backward
to make it all right.
When I see him now, he is always on the
landing, and I am always just one second away from having to save him.
I am so scared to be an inch, a foot, a mile away from him sometimes,
knowing that I might not reach him. How many times can I almost save
him? When we I be too far away to ever do anything ever again?
When will I finally miss?
But he is no longer an eight-month-old almost
toddler, and I am almost at the point of knowing I have to look at him on
the edge, see my boy smiling up at me, and wave, turn, walk away from the
danger he so likes to live on. Walk slowly out of the room and close
the door.
---
Jessica
Jessica Barksdale Inclan is the author of
twelve novels and teaches composition, creative writing, mythology, and
women’s literature at Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, California.
She also teaches creative writing courses online and
on-land for UCLA extension. Her website is www.jessicabarksdaleinclan.com.
GRASSROOTS
I just received my most recent sales statement,
which either shows the economic downturn has hit my own personal book sales
or, more likely, I haven’t found the right way to market my newest short
story collection.
It occurs to me that if nothing else, I should
aim for a grassroots effort and shamelessly ask you to help. While Months
and Seasons had a great opening month, I’ve only sold a hundred copies
since July. Nearly two-dozen reviews, which are listed on my site at Red Room,
trumpet my book, but with 200,000 other new titles out this year, it takes
more than that. It takes people like you to help an author along.
So if you’re thinking of book gifts to give
this month, consider mine. Here are a few easy links, below. Amazon
is selling them at about twenty-five percent off list. Just click on a
cover below.
Today I received a letter from the Small Press
Department at Barnes and Noble headquarters in New York. The letter
says that Barnes and Noble is stocking The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea in
their distribution network, available to any customers who ask for
it. That’s the trick—customers have to ask for it.
The letter went on to say, “The buyer
responsible for short stories has decided not to stock your book on the
shelves of our retail stories at this time. Our experience has taught
us that for a short story collection to be successful in our stories, it
needs a compelling jacket, good advance reviews in the trade magazines,
quotes from other writers in this genre, followed by articles/reviews in
the usual consumer media. For us as booksellers, the combination of these
elements as well as the publisher's/author's marketing and promotion plan
helps us determine the odds of the book's success on the shelves in our
stores.”
In short, I need help from the
grassroots. Do you have any friends or loved ones who might enjoy a
book of short stories?
COVER SELECTION
Last month, my friend and graphic designer,
Daniel Will-Harris, did as he’s done for my published books. He created a
number of possible covers for my next title. This time it’s for my first
novel, The Brightest Moon of the Century. He had read the manuscript
and created imagery based on different chapters. For instance, there
was a close-up on a cat’s face, another on a lizard’s tail, and a cover of
a young woman with a mobile home behind her. These things are in one
chapter or another.
Each of the covers were eye-grabbing, and while
I had a favorite, I’ve learned from Donald Trump that market research is
highly important, so I sent the covers to a number of people. I soon found
ardent supporters of each cover. One respondent, a marketing whiz, simply said
by selecting the cat cover, I’d sell more books. However, a cat only
comes up in one chapter.
One of my graduate students, Marlon Green,
wrote, “I definitely like the 'man and the moon' one best. It is
instantly recognizable and has different levels of subtext. Is he
praying? Has he had all he can take? It raises a question,
what's up with this guy? This is the book I would open first based on
those covers.”
Author Madelyn Cain wrote me, “I particularly
love the man with arms outstretched to the moon. There's a young
person feel to it, an evocativeness I like. The future is ahead of him. And
what a great title.”
That mirrored my feelings. Sid Stebel, my
colleague at USC, gave me the best reasoning on how to choose. He
wrote, “When I was in advertising, and particularly in movie adverts, I
learned that one must never mislead audiences. It pisses them off. Friends
of mine once had me come to a studio meeting where they were discussing how
to advertise The Monster, based on a Stephen Crane story. The
monster of the title was a servant who had been disfigured in saving the
family's son from a fire. The studio insisted, over my objection, in
selling it as a ‘monster’ picture, instead of the sensitive story it was.
The first audience who saw it were monster aficionados, who hated the film,
and the subsequent word of mouth killed it. It’s the same theory as query
letters, no? You tell them honestly what to expect when they read, and when
it's not what they expect, they're pissed.”
Here’s what it’s about: In The Brightest
Moon of the Century, Edward, a young Minnesotan, is blessed with an
abundance of "experience"—first when his mother dies and next
when his father, an encyclopedia salesman, shoehorns Edward into a private
boys school where he's tortured and groomed.
Edward needs a place in the universe, but he
also wants an understanding of women. He stumbles into romance in high
school, careens through dorm life in college, whirls into a tornado of love
problems as a mini-mart owner in a trailer park in Alabama, and aims for a
film career in Los Angeles. Will his love for a Latina prove to be the one?
In nine chapters, the reader experiences
Edward's life from ages 14 to 45. Thus, I needed a cover that
captures the essence of his journey and an image that pops up through the
book: the moon. Thus, this is the cover my book will have:
I thank my friends who responded to my covers.
I certainly get by with the help of my friends.
NEXT CLASSES
For those of you who’ve been waiting for me to
teach at UCLA Extension again, I’m finally doing it in January with a
six-week class called “The Essential Beginnings.” It’s for
people new to writing stories as well as people simply new to taking
writing classes. Sometimes I’ll even have well-seasoned writers who
just want to get back to the basics again. Don’t worry about how well you
write. Know that there will be friendly people there.
I’ll be going over story structure and story
inspiration. Even though everyone is writing prose, you’ll see clips from
certain films to isolate elements of story. You get to try out things
in class, too with writing exercises. We’ll read Bird by Bird by
Anne Lamott, and you’ll have a chance to workshop new stories.
It’ll meet Tuesday nights at 7 p.m. at UCLA
Extension’s new building in downtown Los Angeles on Figueroa.
Starting in March, I’ll have another six-week class, an intermediate one
called “The Writer’s Workout.”
To learn more or sign up, call below.
UCLA Extension
10995 Le Conte Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90024-2883
Registration and General Information
(310) 825-9971 or (818) 784-7006
Website: https://www.uclaextension.edu/index.cfm
Meanwhile, at Santa Monica College, starting
February 17th, I’ll be teaching Children’s Literature (English
18), which is about writing children’s books. It’s a three-unit class at
$20 a unit—as inexpensive as it comes. You can already have a degree and
take classes at Santa Monica College. For more information, go to www.smc.edu.
Howarth
Park, Santa Rosa, at Thanksgiving
See you next time,
--Chris
For reviews or more
information on my book below, click on the cover. Who Lives? will
be mounted in a new production in Los Angeles starting March 12,
2009. More on that in the next issue.
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