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The
Maplewoods Mirror #35 - March 2009
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 book, Months and Seasons, click here.
In This Issue
WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS
AGAIN
My novel The Brightest Moon of the Century is
here at last. It was supposed to publish on March 7, but Amazon jumped the
gun, and that’s okay. I come to you with a favor. If you’ve been wanting to
buy the novel, please buy it today, at Amazon,
BN.com,
or by asking your favorite bookstore to get it.
If you want to wait until March 7th to
get it at my reading and publication party at Vroman’s Bookstore, that’s
great, too—or any other shopping day is fine. However, if you buy it from
Amazon TODAY, I am hoping its ranking will increase. Each purchase
makes the ranking go up by a few thousand.
I'm singing again for my supper
A lot of sales in a day brings attention at
Amazon, and considering the marketing budget on this book is very low, I’m
hoping you will start a grassroots effort, first by buying the book, and,
if you like it, giving it away and/or writing a positive review on Amazon
or BN.com. These days, marketing is fueled by the author in large part, and
rather than grumble about the old days, I’m diving into these new days.
If you don’t know about The Brightest Moon
of the Century, it revolves around Edward, a young Minnesotan, who 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
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. In nine chapters, you experience Edward's life
from ages 14 to 45.
To my surprise, four reviews are already out.
Marc Schuster at Small Press Reviews writes, “The
Brightest Moon of the Century is the work of an expert storyteller. The
characters come alive, the writing sparkles, and the story of Edward’s
journey rings true through every twist and turn. A great and truly humane
novel in the tradition of Charles Dickens and John Irving.” (For the full
review, click
here.)
Grady Harp,
an Amazon Top Ten Reviewer, wrote an in-depth piece, contrasting my short
fiction with my novel and finding I’m one of the few to jump from writing
captivating short fiction to mastering a novel. He says, “This is a fine
novel, an engrossing story, and a group of indelible characters who linger
in the mind long after novel's end. Meeks has done it again.” (For his full
review, click
here.)
Heather Figearo at
Raging Bibliomania writes, “This story would be perfect for someone
who appreciates the outright unpredictability of life. I have no doubt that
Edward and his quest for fulfillment will be loved by many. In one word,
outstanding.” (For her full review, click
here.)
Sam Sattler at
Book Chase adds, “The Brightest Moon of the Century is one
man’s story, a very ordinary man, at that, but Christopher Meeks has filled
that story with enough interesting characters and episodes to remind just
how limitless and filled with surprises even the most ordinary of lives can
be. Meeks’s characters, and his slightly off centered view of life,
continue to remind me of John Irving’s early work, definitely a good
thing.” (For his full review, click
here.)
As I write this, the ranking is at 534,492 (out
of four million books), which is a better spot than when I announced Months
and Seasons was available. Let’s see how close to #1 we can get it. If
it breaks under 90,000, I’m very happy. If it breaks 65,000, where my
last short story collection reached, I’m ecstatic.
If it gets below, 50,000, I don’t have the
words yet to describe it. Let’s see where it goes. :)
Thank you. Without my friends and readers, I’m
merely someone scratching on a wall with a nail.
I'll be reading at Vroman's Bookstore in
Pasadena (Colorado
Blvd. at El Molino) on March 7, 5 p.m. Free
food and drink!
AT THE AWP CONFERENCE
By Sandra Vahtel
I asked my former student, Sandra, who is the
editor of the Southern California Review and who will
graduate from USC’s Master of Professional Writing Program in May, to write
about her experiences of the conference held by the Association of Writers
and Writing Programs (AWP) last month in Chicago.
“What are you going to at 12:30 on Saturday?” I
asked my friend Annlee as we sat high above the Windy City on the ninth
floor of the Chicago Hilton. It was the night before the AWP conference,
and we were in our second hour of devising, hunched over maps and charts
like army generals, a plan of attack. We found ourselves overwhelmed by the
sheer enormity of the conference: three days of panels, six time slots per
day, and at least a dozen panels to choose from during each time slot.
The book fair, which occupied four huge rooms
with rows and rows of booths inhabited by every imaginable literary journal
and creative writing program in the country, was equally gargantuan. And
what about Chicago itself? We wanted to soak up as much of the city made
famous by crooked politics, improvisational comedy, hotdogs, and
speakeasies as possible. Perhaps we were kidding ourselves to think we
could do it all, but damn it, we were going to try.
The book exhibition at the AWP Conference
That do-everything attitude failed almost
immediately on day one when I quickly realized that I am not a panel
person. Nor am I an intellectual, and I found many of the panels to be dry
and academic—an aspect of the study of writing that is mercifully absent
from the Master of Professional Writing Program at USC. I scheduled myself
for three panels in a row but barely made it, skipping out early on each
one. After all, there was only so much of the Milkweed founders I
could take. Instead, I went upstairs and took a nap.
Writer and MPW grad James Jordan attended the
Ron Carlson panel
The next day, I concentrated on the book fair.
There, I walked between display after display of books—an explosion of
colors and words and images. Tchotchkes lay everywhere, pins, stickers,
highlighters and candy, all free for the taking. As current editor-in-chief
of the Southern California Review, the student-run literary journal
of the MPW, I wanted to gain insight from other students of similar ilk.
Those I met, from the likes of the Columbia
Review, Dos Passo Review, and the Water-Stone Review, were
friendly and enthusiastic, eager to share their stories of staffing woes
and submission practices. Afterwards I felt reassured, this being my first
semester at the helm of the Southern California Review, that a
finished journal was indeed in reach.
Hearing the great Northern Irish poet Paul
Muldoon was a treat, as was legendary slam poet Patricia Smith. I missed
Ron Carlson’s panel but saw him later outside the hotel, climbing into a
taxi, looking tanned and healthy and no doubt off to some warmer clime.
Author Ron Carlson speaks on a panel with his
editor, Katie Dublinkski
The fact that there were all those writers
there—a sea of them, all in one place—was affirming. Somehow I didn’t feel
so strange or marginalized for wanting to build words into sentences and
construct those sentences into stories.
An audience member at one of the panels posed
what has become my favorite moment of the AWP: he stood up and asked why,
as writers, do we question why we write? After all, he said, carpenters
don’t question why they’re carpenters; they know their duty, and it is to
construct.
It was at that moment that I first truly
believed that the simple act of writing was important, and enough, for the
practice itself has been around certainly as long as Moses. Writers don’t
need to assign meaning to their work or to validate it in the face of a
crumbling economy and financial upheaval. No, the practice of writing, in
and of itself, the telling of truths, is certainly, and most comfortingly,
enough.
A snow sculpting competition was going on
outside the AWP Conference
BECOMING EDVARD MUNCH
I, too, was in Chicago for the Association of
Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Conference, where I skipped out one
afternoon to see a new exhibition of Edvard Munch's artwork. At the writing
conference, one of the best panels I partook was on flash fiction where Ron
Carlson, Robert Olen Butler and other authors read funny and moving short
pieces. Butler also spoke about the difference between very short stories
and prose poems.
Robert
Olen Butler
Butler said, "When you have a human being
centrally present in a literary work and you let the line length run on and
you turn the page, you are, as they say in a long storytelling tradition,
‘upon a time.'"
As his audience absorbed that thought, he
added, "Any Buddhist will tell you, a human being--or a ‘character' in
your story--cannot exist for even a few seconds of time on planet Earth
without desiring something. Yearning is a word I prefer because it
suggests the deepest level of desire, where literature strives to go. Every
short story is about yearning."
This thought of yearning made me think of my
own characters who always have a conscious goal and often an unconscious
one marked by yearning.
Later that day, I realized how yearning, too,
is so much a part of Edvard Munch's artwork. Four blocks down from the
conference was the Chicago Institute of Art, which, on Valentines Day,
opened a new show called Becoming Edvard Munch: Influence, Anxiety, and
Myth. I'd lived in Denmark in my junior year of college, where I
learned about Munch in a Scandinavian art history class, and I've traveled
a few times to Oslo where I immersed myself in the Munch Museum.
Some people pigeonhole Munch as the
anxiety-ridden artist who best expressed a fear of life in "The
Scream." But he didn't fear life entirely. He traveled extensively,
especially to Germany and Paris where he learned from many other artists
including the Impressionists. His early work was realistic, as shown in the
exhibition in a painting of a young woman sitting in a Norwegian field.
Young woman in a Norwegian field -- an early
work of Munch's
During a Paris trip, he experimented with
pointillism and broader, more expressionistic brush strokes. His scenes
were not anxiety-filled but rather peaceful.
Munch painted outdoors often and captured its
beauty, such as in his own version of "Starry Night."
"Starry Night"
Later, though, he focused in on deep emotions,
things other painters avoided. Then again, he was encouraged to do so when
he saw a few other artists show the sadder side of life, such as Norwegian
painter Hans Heyerdahl in his "Dying Child," of 1889, that Munch
admired in writing. Munch went on to paint several scenes of his
sister Sophie dying of tuberculosis, which she did when he and she were
both teenagers. His mother, too, died of the disease when he was very
young.
"Melancholy"
Munch through a long career experimented with
technique and loved to focus on emotion, including love, desire,
depression, jealousy, and, yes, anxiety. Part of his anxiousness had been
fueled not only by the death around him when he was young, but also by a
deeply religious father. Munch wrote in his diary, "The angels
of fear, sorrow and death stood by my side since the day I was born. They
stood by my bedside when I shut my eyes, threatening me with death, hell
and eternal damnation."
Still, Munch also held an awe of beauty. His
experiments in color, painting techniques, and different printing
techniques including woodcuts, etching, and lithography let him push the
intensity of his emotions. This guy felt things.
Because he drank heavily at times and had a
number of affairs, drama happened, too, including a jilted girlfriend who
shot off part of one of his fingers. This particular incident became an
obsession to him, which can be seen in images of women sucking the blood of
men. Other paintings show a woman's red hair enveloping a man, trapping
him. Yet he desired, yearned.
The fact he felt sadness and negative emotions
is perhaps what fascinates people to this day. The Chicago show is unlike
anything I've seen in an art show. The paintings and prints are arranged
not chronologically, but by subject matter in fourteen rooms.
This kind of show is fertilizer for a writer.
Even though I teach writing, I tend to discourage stories about writers.
Look around at life being lived. Learn from other types of artists. Learn
from yourself--from your own yearnings. Examine life and any possible
meaning.
To read what the New York Times wrote
about this show, click
here.
For a good short biography of Munch, click here.
WHAT MAKES WRITERS WRITE: My Life with Who Lives?
While I’m a fiction writer now, I discovered in
grad school the joys of writing plays. One of them was that actors would be
reading the lines, and if something didn’t work, he, she, or the director
would tell me. Also, I could sit in the dark and watch people respond to
something I’d written, but the focus wasn’t on me. Rather, people watched
the actors. I was very shy then.
A dozen years ago, I wrote a drama called Who
Lives? It had a successful run in Los Angeles in 1997, and a new
production opens in Los Angeles on March 12. The play
focuses on the first workable kidney dialysis machine and a committee of
ordinary citizens in Seattle who had to select a dozen people who might
live if the machine worked as hoped. The committee had to choose from
among thousands of people dying of kidney disease. Who was worthy to live
and why?
This topic is as important as ever as
healthcare in America can only cover so many people. The play also serves
as a good example of why write anything. Let me back into this subject.
Before this play, I had no connection to kidney
dialysis, but it’s easy to empathize. Whether one has good kidneys or not,
almost everyone grows up feeling different in some way—having “different”
skin color, having a home or family life unlike other people or perhaps not
being smart enough, or talented in sports enough, or not good-looking
enough. Remember the sinking feeling when two team captains would choose
teams for dodge ball? I was never the first choice. We fill the vessels of
our identity as being less than others. That’s an element in the play.
Joe
Ochman directs the current production
The idea of this play did not come to me like
many of my short stories. For example, a short story of mine, “The Rotary,”
in The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea, began when I asked my mother how
her father became bald. She said his baldness was a strange side effect
from surviving the terrible flu epidemic of 1918. That led to my writing a
story where I imagined my grandfather at eighteen in Boston before the
epidemic hit, having an idea of a career different than what his father
wanted for him. Many of my stories are simply “being” someone else that I
can empathize with.
The story for the play came in a way none of my
stories had ever come. I’d been trying my hand at screenwriting at the
time, and I had interested a film producer named Brenda Friend with two of
my scripts, one of which she’d optioned. She would later produce films on
Joan of Arc and inspirational teacher Ron Clark. Before becoming a
producer, Brenda had been an actress and playwright, and she’d seen my play
Suburban Anger. She was, you might say, one of the few people on
earth acquainted with much of my oeuvre.
She asked to meet me, and I was excited—perhaps
she had good news on one of my screenplays. Rather, she handed me a Life
magazine from 1963, and turned to a page about the “life-and-death”
committee for the first kidney dialysis machine. She said, “I think
there’s a play here, but I’m not the one to write it. You might be.”
I took the article and looked at the
silhouetted portraits of members of the committee, an anonymous group in Seattle
who had to choose who might possibly live if given a chance to be a part of
the first long-term test of kidney dialysis.
Instantly, it felt like it could be a reverse Twelve
Angry Men, the famous play by Reginald Rose about a jury deciding
whether a defendant is guilty and should be put to death. The Life
article showed me that the life-and-death committee was a jury of sorts
deciding which few people among thousands dying from failing kidneys might
live. If I wrote a play, it would explore what makes a person valuable—then
and now.
And that’s what I wrote.
Brenda ended up producing the original
production of Who Lives? with Jay McAdams, and it was directed by
Debbie Devine at the 24th Street Theatre near USC, and I thank them
for everything. Now the play is being produced again, thanks to Lori
Hartwell and her organization, the Renal Support Network.
In the new production, Bob Klein (left) plays
Baxter, and Matt Gottlieb is the lead,
Gabriel Hornstein
This production comes to me as an opportunity
to improve on what’s worked well. While the original production was moving,
and the play has been published, this production’s director, Joe Ochman, is
not taking anything in the play for granted. Each moment has to be earned.
We’ve discussed certain scenes, and I’ve found moments to make even more
powerful.
Let me tell you in advance: there’s humor in
this play. The interplay of personalities interests me still and makes me
laugh. It’s not about grimness; it’s about what we value. I see 2009 as the
start of a new age of hope, and this play fits right in.
May you have a chance to witness Who Lives?
which opens for three weeks at the Pico Playhouse, 10508 W. Pico Boulevard
by the Rancho Park golf course. You can read more about the production or
buy tickets at www.wholivesplay.com.
If you can't see the production, you can buy
the book. Amazon
has it, as does Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena, and Skylight Books and Book
Soup in Los Angeles.
The set design by WILL PELLEGRINI for
the new production
MY NEXT CLASS
The next class I teach at UCLA Extension will
be “The Writer's Workout,” a boot camp for writers who simply want to write
again, infuse themselves in thinking about structure, and have some
deadlines. It’s for any level of writer who wants to work. It’s an
eight-week course that meets Tuesday nights in the new downtown campus at
261 South Figueroa.
The catalogue describes the class this way:
The Writer's Workout: Techniques for Stronger
Writing
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.
For more information or to sign up, click
here.
SCHEDULE OF READINGS
Between teaching, going to play rehearsals,
writing a new novel, preparing for the readings I have, and enjoying my
family, I’ve learned I don’t have enough hours in the day. I have not added
any more readings. I’m nonetheless thrilled about the ones I have.
Here’s the full schedule:
Los Angeles:
Saturday, March 7 – Vroman’s Bookstore, 5:00 p.m.
695 E. Colorado Blvd, Pasadena, CA 91101; 626-449-5320
Minnesota:
Saturday, March 21 – The Bookcase in Wayzata, 7:30 p.m.
607 Lake St E, Wayzata, MN 55391; (952) 473-8341
Sunday, March 22 – Kingman Art Studio, 6:30 p.m.
901 Grand St. NE, Minneapolis, MN 55418; (612) 306-4597
While in Chicago, I also visited my
friend, Rev. James Juul of the Church of Good Luck
You can read about his church at https://www.churchofgoodluck.com/
See you next time,
--Chris
For reviews or more
information on my books below, click on the cover. Who Lives? will
be mounted in a new production in Los Angeles starting March 12,
2009.
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