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Joseph E Bird

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Alfred Einstein

Editor’s Note:  The following account is basically true, in the sense that high drama has eluded the author’s life. And in the sense that the author does not have a particularly engaging personality.  And in the sense that the author is pretty much forgettable. It’s not that he hasn’t experienced a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance.  He has.  And there will be more such times.  Nonetheless…

 

Everyone has a story to tell.

I heard that most recently from a writer at a gathering of St. Albans Writes.

“I don’t,” I said.

A lot of people do.

Andrew does.
Chris does.
Ashley does.
Larry does.
Sharon does.
Kevin does.
Amos does.

I could tell you about the most interesting things that have happened in my life, so technically, yeah, I have a story, but it’s not worth telling.  I have no great triumphs; no spectacular failures. I have not experienced war. I have (so far) dodged personal tragedies. I have not traveled the world.  I have not been in the crucible. Even the lessons I’ve learned along the road of life are not associated with intriguing vignettes that might elicit empathy.

You know the guy who throws a dart on the map or closes his eyes and picks out a name in the phone book (remember phone books?) and then goes and interviews them to learn their story?  If he came to my house, it would go something like this.

“So, Joe.  Tell me what it was like growing up in St. Albans.”

“It was nice. We played a lot. Rode bikes. Played in the creek.”

“What was the most traumatic thing you endured as a child?”

“I remember one time I came home from school and the front door was locked.  I couldn’t get inside.  That was pretty bad.”

“How long were you locked out?”

“I don’t know.  Maybe five minutes.”

The clock ticks in the background.  He looks at the guitar setting on the stand.

“Do you play?” he asks.

“A little. I’m really not very good.”

“Can you play something for me?”

“No.”

Tick, tick, tick.

“What about your family?”

“I was found in a shoebox, brought up by welders, and educated by wolves. Then I went to Harvard.”

He raises his eyebrows.

“That’s a line from In Sunlight and In Shadow, a Mark Helprin novel.  No, I’m from a conventional family.  Mom, Dad, two sisters. I was a middle of the road student. At work, just a steady manager type. Been married for almost thirty years.”

He takes a deep breath and exhales slowly.  He taps his pen and looks around the room.  

“What difficult challenges have you had to overcome in life?”

I think for a minute. “People tend to forget my name,” I say. “Sometimes they call me Jim. Or John. So I’ve had to learn not to get offended when they don’t remember me.”

He looks at his watch, but he’s not wearing one.  

“Ok, then.”

He leaves.  The segment never airs.

I have no compelling story to tell, but I’m not complaining.  I’m glad that my life has been absent of trauma and gut-wrenching challenges. Boring can be good.

If I want to tell a story, I’ll just do what I’ve always done.  I’ll make one up.

Remind me some day to tell you about Albert Einstein’s brother, Alfred.

 

 

 

 

 

 

4

Larry Ellis Live

If you stop by from time to time you know about Larry Ellis, prolific poet and award-winning novelist.  Today (Thursday, February 25) at 1:00 ET, he’s going to be a guest on Frankie Picasso’s internet radio show on the TogiNet Radio Network. He’ll be talking about his latest novel, Overtime, A Basketball Parable.  You can listen live here.  If you happen to miss it, it will be up later as a podcast.

1

The River of Life

alban fresco for web

HE HAD NO IDEA WHERE HE WAS. He had no idea where he was going. He just walked.

After a few minutes the buzz in his ears had subsided and he began to hear the sounds of the city, the noise of the streets. The taxis revving, the heavy groan of diesel engines moving trucks and buses. From a distance, a siren sang into the night. A horn blared next to him. He turned to look and a cab driver shook his fist and yelled something in an unknown tongue to another cabbie.

He walked on. The rubber soles of his hiking boots made no sound on the concrete. There were other people, but the sidewalk was far from crowded. He walked straightway but there was never a moment when he had to sidestep to avoid an encounter with someone else. They seemed to employ a kind of urban sonar that initiated almost imperceptible course adjustments as they moved toward their destination. No one spoke as they passed. No smiles. No eye contact. It was as if the city, for all its celebration of life and culture, shunned the random discovery of another individual.

Though the stores were closed, restaurants and watering holes teased with a hint of celebration and inclusiveness. But he knew that people like him, those who by either natural tendencies or situations that had been forced upon them, were more comfortable sitting to the side and observing. People like him, were they to expose themselves to the illusion of grand party, would again learn the hurtful truth that no one really cared.

No one really cared.

The night was cooling. He zipped up his jacket.

He had been walking for more than an hour but it wasn’t the time that he noticed. It was the quiet. If the street was the river of life in the city, he had hiked to its headwater. Or maybe a tributary. A slower body of water, more peaceful. When hiking in the forest, he would often find a rock beside the river and let his mind drift with the placid current.

He stopped. Ahead, a small group, men and women, loitered on the stoop of a walk-up. He looked behind. A couple of people walked in the opposite direction. He must have passed them but he couldn’t remember. Across the street, a warm yellow light flooded onto the sidewalk from the neon sign of a pub. Edie’s. No. Eddie’s. One of the ds had lost its glow. Either way.

He was tired. He needed to rest.

copyright: joseph e bird, 2016
photo copyright: joseph e bird, 2014

 

0

She walks.

snowy neighborhood for web

It was another snowy night.

Larry Ellis lives in the same neighborhood I do. The scene last night was much like the photo above.  In the middle of the snow storm, he looked out his window and saw a young woman walking down the street, all alone in her world of white.  He wrote this:

She walks through the snow as if walking through time
The storm had covered all, erasing the present
Yesterday’s litter, this year’s rust, the cracks in the pavement
All gone under white
The streetlights, the porchlights, the moonlight and starlight
All combine tonight
Every line is straight and even, every wall upright
.
And she comes walking through as if from the past
As if from another world: maybe this perfect, soundless world
She walks alone and seems unworried
Unaffected by this that has kept every car in its garage
And has closed the schools and churches
.
Is her coat, so perfectly fitting
From another day?
Does she walk to some grand house
Now long vanished
That has reappeared in the throes of this storm?
That house where yellow light from tall windows
Makes bright rectangles on the snow in the lawn?
Will there be someone at that door to meet her
Someone to take her coat?
Candles and wine on the table
And a fire in the hearth?

Copyright 2016, Larry Ellis

1

The Casimir Effect

The story of Trevor and Sheu-lo had started with a conversation about apples. There had been no flash of physical magnetism, no sparks flew, no glint in the eye, no wry smile, no hint of seduction whatsoever. None of the elements that had made his encounters with Dani so gut-wrenchingly wonderful. Yet as their conversation had moved from Fuji apples to Bob Dylan and Eminem, something happened.

“It’s the Casimir effect,” Sheu-lo had said weeks later after they had finally abandoned the pretense that they were colleagues, nothing more. She had made the comment over dinner in a dimly lit restaurant, where music never played, an irony that Trevor found appealing.

“It’s a scientific principle. Casimir was a physicist who experimented with electromagnetic fields. Everyone knows about positive and negative fields.”

“Opposites attract,” Trevor said.

“Right. But Casimir discovered that there is a small attractive force that acts between two uncharged plates.”

“Not opposites?”

“Just two plain, metal plates.”

At first they had maintained their worlds separately, but they soon overlapped. And though they were spending many evenings together at Trevor’s insistence, they had limited their physical involvement. There were lapses in discipline which played on Trevor’s guilt on different levels. The feelings that he had for Sheu-lo were built on a foundation of respect.

There was no dramatic proposal, no elaborate ceremony.

They were married in Max’s church, attended by their families.

3

Twenty two minutes.

guitar 2-6-16 for web

AT FIFTEEN MINUTES PAST TEN the next morning, the news site flashed a red banner across the top of the screen announcing a plane crash in Texas. He clicked the link and saw that it was a commuter flight from Houston to Dallas. He would not have been shocked if it had been their flight. That’s how life worked, it seemed.

Witnesses reported a giant fireball. He looked at his disfigured left hand and touched the side of his face and felt the scars.  He knew the agony they would have to endure if there were survivors, but that was unlikely.

If you want to know a man, know his pain.

It was one of dozens of quotes he had heard in his freshman literature class at the University of Tennessee, but the only one that stuck with him. For obvious reasons.

At the time, the physical pain he had endured was still fresh and still issuing reminders that his body had been greatly traumatized. During the months of recovery he had put on the brave face and carried a resolute disposition. And then the real pain began. The isolation. The guilt that never quite seemed to leave him.

If you want to know a man, know his pain.

He closed the internet browser.

He was supposed to be compiling demographic data to be used in establishing the housing ratios for the Renaissance project, but his thoughts were elsewhere. Loss. Grief. Dani. His own desolation.

He opened a new document and closed his eyes as he let his emotions speak to him.

He felt the rhythm first. A slow, three-four time. His body swayed slightly, his eyes still closed. Then music. The chords. On the down beat.

He opened his eyes, his fingers on the computer keyboard.

At first, random words: Pain. Loneliness. Her smile. Her eyes.

Then they began to find order.

Bring me back
from the dark of night,

Let me feel
love in your light.

He wished he had his guitar. He wrote a chord progression, not sure if it was really what he wanted. A melody started to form in his head and he wrote to it.

More random thoughts filled the page. He wrote quickly, trying to capture the mood without losing the music. A chorus. More words altered the mood and he heard the change in the tune that would comprise the bridge. There were typos all over the page but he didn’t dare interrupt the flow. More words. The last verse. And the chorus again.

He read from beginning to end. He closed his eyes and let it sink in.

Then again from the beginning, this time singing softly.

Then he scrolled back to the top of the page and wrote: Bring Me Back, by Trevor Larson.

It had taken him twenty-two minutes.

2

Knowing when to end the story.

I said recently, “I just found out how the story of Trevor Larson ends.”

I was referring to the novel I’ve been working on for the past year.  Faithful reader Lee Anne asked, “Do you not begin with an ending in mind? I thought writers had a whole outline of the story complete before starting the words. How do you know when you’re finished?”

Many of you won’t be interested in this discussion, but some of my internet friends are writers or are contemplating writing a novel, so I offer this as a case study.

I’ve heard it said that novel writers are either “pansters” or “plotters”.  The panster being one who writes by the seat of the pants with little or no thought to plot or where the story is going.  The plotter, of course, plots out the story from beginning to end.  I have a hard time understanding how you could be a panster and create a coherent novel that meets the expectations of the mainstream reader.  Many writers succesfuly take this approach, but it would be hard for me to do without wandering down every side street available.  So I guess I’m a plotter.

In fact, here’s what I did with the Trevor Larson story.  I had an idea.  A “what if” scenario.  That’s the seed.  So I think about the scenario and and whether or not there’s enough meat in the concept around which to build a novel.

If the answer is yes, then I think about character arc.  In the case of Trevor, he encounters challenges early in the story.  And the challenges keep coming. The arc is completed when he learns how to handle the challenges. When the novel ends, he has to be a changed person, for better or worse. Again, this is early in the concept stage.

Then I think in terms of three acts and the arc becomes more defined. My target word count is 80,000 words and for me, I average around 4,000 words a chapter.  That would be 20 chapters, more or less. But if I’m thinking three acts, that would be roughly 7 chapters per act. Then I think in even more detail about the story and and will try to write a few sentences about what will happen in each chapter.

For me, that’s pretty serious plotting.

Except…

Things happen along the way. Characters that I thought would be minor rise up into a major role. Dani, for example. Characters that I thought would be significant fall away or even die. In Trevor’s story, it’s Jackson Little. And the characters go off and do something that wasn’t foreseen.  I didn’t know Trevor was going to be such a gifted songwriter when the story began, but that ends up being a key plot device.

That’s the fun mess of writing. The characters come alive and tell me what’s going on.

Yes, Lee Anne, I had an idea of how the story was going to end, but the last couple of chapters were agonizing. My novels are low-key so there’s no final heoric scene or anything like that.  I have to see how relationships develop and how and where to stop the story that gives the reader a sense of satisfaction. It’s pretty much where I thought it would be, just not exactly. But all along, it was entirely possible that Trevor could have gone off script. He has a habit of doing that. That’s what makes him interesting.

 

 

2

Words

 

I just found out how the story of Trevor Larson ends.

It took 91,000 words and 12 months.

Some of the things Trevor told me, though, are inconsistent.  I’ll have to talk to him more and sort those things out.

For now, it’s satisfying to close the loop.

4

Stillness.

They sat quietly and thought about the words that had been said, thought about their pasts, their families, themselves. In the stillness of the room, their thoughts touched and their feelings mingled as the shadows of the blinds moved slowly across the table and the warm sunlight crept across their skin. He felt it. She felt it. There was something, they both knew.

9

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