During my reading of Trials of the Monkey, by Matthew Chapman (pg. 53), I came across this Filipino word: bungungot. It describes a spiritual homesickness, a sorrow so profound it kills. It occurs among people who believe their land is imbued with spirits, such as those of their ancestors. To be torn from this land is to be torn from your soul. The forced abandonment of ancestral lands imposed by the U.S. on Native Americans, such as the Cherokee, comes to mind. In my second novel, Trout Run, I try to depict the antithesis of bungungot; that is, Eddy’s return to a cursed homeland in a desperate effort to find a new heart and a soul.

Quote of the Day: “To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.”  Elbert Hubbard

Nurse logs are a paradox: In death there is life. If you’ve walked through a Northwest forest chances are you’ve seen them, those long-dead firs, cedars, maples that have succumbed to gravity and lie upon the forest floor, decomposed and decomposing, giving rise to a riotous nursery of ferns, mushrooms and saplings. They sometimes make you pause, make you halt to consider for that moment the beauty of mortality.

Quote of the Day: “We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.” Ernest Hemingway

One of the many literary influences upon my writing is the novel The Stranger by Albert Camus. I taught it for many years in AP English, and both its style and content have thoroughly imbued my writing bones. First, it has an apt title. The main character, Meursault, usually strikes the reader as a “stranger” in that he doesn’t respond to social cues the way most of us do. For example, he doesn’t feel remorse at the death of his mother, he’s apparently indifferent to marrying his girlfriend Marie, he commits a murder in an almost casual manner and he’s a relatively uninterested participant in his own trial for that murder. Ultimately, society condemns him, but I’m not so sure most readers do. Likewise, in TK Eddy may strike some readers as a stranger: he makes no real attempt to save his marriage, he often lashes out in anger, he’s an atheist and he sometimes hurts those who try to help him. However, I suspect he’s more sympathetic to the reader than Meursault and, therefore, I don’t believe most will condemn him. In Eddy, I tried to create a character who both frustrates the reader and yet makes him/her root for him. Secondly, I really enjoy Camus’ writing style. His sentences are short; his dialogue, spare; his descriptions, brief. He sparely employs the use of figures of speech, adjectives and adverbs. My style tends toward minimalism, as does Camus’ in The Stranger, but I wouldn’t consider myself to be a minimalist. I would, though, describe my style as “spare.” And finally, even though Camus himself rejected the notion he was an existentialist writer, I embrace it–not in the nihilistic sense, but rather the quasi-Romantic sense. More on this later.

Quote of the Day:

“The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.” Anaïs Nin

Walt Whitman often started his day of composing poems or essays with a breakfast of oysters and meat, while at Franz Kafka’s desk you might see a glass of milk. To keep his weight down Lord Byron sipped vinegar (how Romantic!). Cold toast and stale coffee for John Steinbeck, and home-baked bread for Emily Dickinson. F. Scott Fitzgerald liked his canned meat and apples. More modern writers like Michael Pollen prefer tea out of a glass and roasted almonds, while Truman Capote enjoys coffee at 11 a.m., mint tea at noon, sherry at 2 p.m. and a martini at four.

In Trout Kill Eddy eats very poorly. At one point he wolfs down a steak raw. He often goes without meals. He gorges on rhubarb pie, which he later throws up. He swills booze and beer and smokes marijuana.

I write in our basement next to a sliding patio door that opens to a small rock garden. When I write I always have at my side a cup of coffee or tea. Sometimes I’ll nibble on dried almonds or a cinnamon roll from Grand Central Bakery, a short walk from our home. Usually though, no food; for me it’s a distraction, and there are already plenty enough of those, what with the skittering leaves and cavorting squirrels.

Quote of the day:

The process of writing has something infinite about it. Even though it is interrupted each night, it is one single notation. Elias Canetti

Shout-out for Reviews!

I’m issuing an all-call to those readers who have ordered Trout Kill through Amazon, either the paperback or Kindle versions: I NEED REVIEWS! When I visited the Amazon site this afternoon I noticed the little blue words saying “Be the first to review this item.” Here’s your chance to be a literary critic. Come on, you can do this. Just go to this link and follow the simple prompts: 1) enter a pen name, either your real name or one you make up for anonymity; 2) rate Trout Kill by giving it 1-5 stars; 3) enter a title for your review; and 4) share your opinion, either by video or with words (at least 20). That’s all there is to it. It takes about one minute. Thanks, and Happy New Year to all!

As I write I’m constantly taking Google excursions, researching some obscurity to get a fact right or authentically described. For example, I’m currently writing a scene in which Eddy and his sister Em are looking at an oil painting of Rose’s, their long-deceased, artistic mother. Marge, a friend of Em’s who knows something of art history, has described the style of the painting as abstract expressionism. This fictional factoid send me scurrying to Wikipedia. There, I find many references to abstract expressionists, such as Jackson Pollack and Willem de Kooning. There are examples of their works, and I’m attracted to a de Kooning painting, Woman V, 1952-53. I would describe Woman V as the very fractured, colorfully smudged body of a woman–but that’s my description of abstraction, not Eddy’s. So I have to translate my description into how I think Eddy would see the painting. In the scene I’m writing, I’m trying to convey the idea that the painting Em is showing Eddy is similar to the de Kooning painting in style and subject matter. Eddy thinks to himself, “It looks like a chain-sawed woman’s face sutured with a rainbow.” So, I’ve just spent about an hour on a sentence, and chances are I’ll eventually either change it or throw it out. Such is research. I love it; I hate it.

I carry this pocket-sized notebook around and am always jotting down impressions, images, etc. that might or might not eventually find their way into my novels. When I take a walk in the local woods with my dog Tucker, in the midst of the trees I often pull out the notebook and scrawl a thought down. Here’s a random one from weeks past: “I don’t have a soul, just thoughts and feelings that occupy me. A walk in these woods dissolves that occupation, turns it from stone into flowing water.” Where the hell did that come from? How do the woods, ironically it seems, evoke such soulful thoughts from a soul-less guy? The word “occupation” is vaguely threatening, especially when juxtaposed with “flowing water.” And what of that “stone”? In the Trout Trilogy the woods are alluded to several times; they seem to be one of Eddy’s frames of reference. He’s a former logger who killed trees for a living. He’s got a “nailing tree” in his backyard that he’s slowing killing. Yet he seeks isolation in the woods as if they might heal some vital aspect of his being. Are these contradictions? What do these things suggest about Eddy?

A fractured man and his fractured sister–that’s the central storyline in TK. Eddy and Em share a bad history. How bad? You’ll have to read the book to find out. That history has left them psychologically “fractured”–defensive, paranoid, sensitive, yearning and extremely dependent upon one another. Neurotic and maybe borderline psychotic. A prof once told me the difference: The neurotic person builds a dream castle in the sky, and the psychotic person lives in one. I always appreciated that explanation. Maybe Eddy and Em just rent one from time to time.

So, the question I posed in my last post was this: Does Trout Kill transport you? By this I meant does it take you to a place that’s transcendent and helps you temporarily “forget” the here and the now, the “real” world that surrounds you. One book that transported me was Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand. (You can find a Wikipedia link to Unbroken on my Book Recommendations page; it’s the second listing.) I usually identify with strong male characters who overcome big odds. Unbroken is the biography of WWII hero Louis Zamperini, a former Olympic track star who survives a plane crash in the Pacific theater, spends 47 days drifting on a raft and then more than two and a half years as a prisoner of war in several brutal Japanese internment camps. The word hero is used so much anymore it’s almost become meaningless. Louis Z., though, sure fits the bill: fearless, intelligent, strong, resourceful, principled and morally upright. He kills sharks with a pair of pliers. The main interest I have in the characters I create, though, is their many imperfections. Eddy Trout, the protagonist in Trout Kill, is certainly no Louis Z., but can he be considered “heroic” in the modern, existential sense of the word? The existential hero is sometimes described as the character who stands alone against the crowd; he has a will to exist; he generates a self-interpretation of himself and the world from his own experiential history. His experience constitutes “authentic” experience. He accepts his own mortality and finds meaning in the meaninglessness of finite experience. He is usually an atheist who rejects the metaphysical “crutch” offered by religions. He is fully conscious and this awareness may fill him with fear and trembling, but he acts boldly in the face of it. Your question for the day: Is Eddy an existential hero? if not, what is he?

Hold your index finger a foot in front of your nose, and look well beyond it at what ever is there, maybe a wall or the horizon. Some of you will see only one finger there, while others will “see” two “ghostly” fingers. Our rational minds tell us there is one actual finger, but for many of us–me included–our private sensory experience reports “seeing” not one but two. Being rational, even those of us who see two would never suspend disbelief and accept the ghost finger as real. The trick of good storytelling, however, is to do just that–suspend the reader’s disbelief and get him to accept that fictitious finger as reality. The Big Question for me as a writer is this: How well–or not well–do I pull off this trick of suspending my reader’s disbelief? I have no clue if I do or don’t. Sure, I’ve read my stories aloud to friends and fellow writers, and their feedback has always been generally positive. But it’s also been analytic. I’ve never gotten feedback from someone who’s tried to read one of my stories as escapist entertainment, which is why many of us read fiction. You know, the book you hope transports you to another time and place, catches you up in events far removed from those of your own mundane existence. That’s what I want to know about Trout Kill. Does it transport you?