Part One
- Thanks for thinking of me. It seems like we were just at your graduation. Hope you can use the blender. Too bad about the job. Yes, the business world is a desert; I guess yours was kind of a six-figure desert.
- Regarding advice: I’m flattered you asked. Please know my career has been pretty circular—from my couch, to the office, to the bathroom. Subsidized by odd jobs, security guard to dog-walking. Asking a writer for career advice is kind of like asking a racehorse to make you cinnamon toast.
- You need tools. And you need to know how to use them. My second writing teacher, Junior year college, on the first day said, “If you want to learn sentence structure, plot, and the elements of fiction, go buy a book.” He smoked in class, came in once, half-drunk. He didn’t iron his shirts and could recite hundreds of lines of verse, from Catullus to Dickinson, Yeats to Dylan.
- Punctuation is the Devil’s playground; the Oxford comma, his personal secret weapon. I’ve found, for some strange reason, editors like colons in titles. This is more a quirk than a writing tip. Like knowing Stevie Wonder used all black keys for “Superstition.”
- Regarding those tools, learn the basics. I’m a “basic foundation” guy. For example, guitar. You just need three chords—you have a thousand songs. No need to learn an augmented fifth over a ninth; you’re not Steely Dan. Simple, compound, complex sentences. Simile vs. metaphor; if you’ve been drinking, maybe a MacGuffin vs. Deus ex Machina.
- The average novelist doesn’t make minimum wage.
- Hope for publication is like… old classmates at a reunion. No, not that first ten-year one where everyone’s still on the way up and hope and dreams are still in bubble wrap. Not the “I’m up for promotion” and “They’re looking at my script” reunion.
- I’m pretty sure Emily Dickinson didn’t go to her class reunion. And, while I’m thinking on it, “Amazing Grace” is played on all black keys.
- Words become sentences, become drafts, become writing, become hope for publication, and that writing morphs into the fifty-year reunion where the wrong people have died and you find yourself at an hors d’oeuvres table, with gamey salmon on Ritz crackers, and you’re surrounded by folks you hardly knew, maybe didn’t like; folks who made fun of you and laughed at the poem you wrote in fifth period English.
- Yeah, words and writing are like that. And too often you’re stuck with drafts you don’t want or need, or can’t publish, but they survived and they keep promising to “stay in touch.”
- Ok. I just read that last bit. Sorry. I wrote that before my morning coffee, which is always ill-advised. I’ll try to be more “optimistic” and “encouraging.” Writing is hard; people are harder. The future is wearing a mask.
- How’s old Brutus? Where does he sleep in that studio apt.? I remember when you were in grade school and you said something at Thanksgiving about how dogs were more reliable than boys. Smarter too. Some truths imprint early.
- By my second year out of college, I’d published more poems than Emily had in her lifetime. This doesn’t really mean anything; the world is full of false equivalencies, bad reality shows, and lousy poems that win the prize.
- Regarding encouragement: It’s important to find the right teacher, mentor, critic. It’s like finding the right running shoes, or the right mattress. (We all know you’ll spend a third of your life in bed. More if you’re a depressed writer.)
- Jesus never wrote anything. Think about that for a minute.
- My freshman year in college I had Mr. H. I was a psychology major working in a biofeedback lab when he wooed me into theater, then English, then Shakespeare, then writing. (And eventually dance, but I found that on my own when I realized I was usually the only guy in those classes.) In addition to his menu of classes, he owned and ran a small theater in town.
- I’m thinking you probably didn’t have a business mentor? Was it just a bunch of classes, some tests and credits, a sharp business outfit, expensive shoes and the promise of a paycheck? Starting a retirement plan at twenty-two?
- It was a small college; we used his theater. Our first production, The Threepenny Opera. I could sing, just well enough, and took on a handful of “extra” roles. I performed in the theater through college, never made a dime. I still remember most of my lines.
- My sophomore year, I quit going to church and took up tap dance. I borrowed 25 bucks to get taps put on an old pair of Oxfords. My time-steps came a lot more naturally than my Hail Mary’s.
- Jesus wasn’t a businessman. He was a “fisher of men.” I never quite knew what that meant. I did realize, at some point, that he didn’t have to “fish” for the women; they came to him naturally. No hook, no bait, no pole.
- I really did try to be more Jesus-like in college. Writing can get lonely.
- And…I soon learned that women liked tap dancers.
- Bertolt Brecht, who wrote The Threepenny Opera, had to flee his country. His audience, the Nazis, didn’t like his plays.
- Two years out of college and broke, my old roommate got me an interview at the small-town police department. I was writing my first screenplay. One of the interviewers, a hard guy with a crew cut and white socks & black penny loafers, asked me what I would do if I had to arrest one of my college friends. I couldn’t get past his smirk, and I said I’d recite Thomas Grey’s Elegy Written in a Church Courtyard. And I started in, got to the third verse before I was dismissed.
- Sorry, writer’s diversion. So, second quarter I took a writing class with Mr. H. titled Modern Poetry. Or, as one of the locals called it that first day of class—he needed an English credit to graduate I later learned, and figured poetry would be an easy answer—”that sissy flowery nature shit that fat girls write.” I do remember he had two first names. Thomas Roberts. And no girlfriend.
- I met my future wife in a poetry class.
- I remember squirming in my desk after Thomas, or Roberts (he used his names interchangeably and without reason) made this declaration and upon looking at the room of maybe twenty students, I suddenly realized he and I were the only “males.” I didn’t consider myself a “sissy” and truthfully, didn’t care much for nature. I grew up in the heart of the city and played football on asphalt.
- I didn’t write about a tree or a bird or a mountain for the next ten years.
- Writers are sensitive.
- If you write from home, it’ll be easier to walk Brutus. Did you have to hire a dog-walker when you had your business job? As I mentioned, I tried dog-walking once when I was broke and trying to finish the Great American Novel. I was a failure; you need to walk at least three dogs to make it worthwhile. Too many leashes. They’d cross each other & I’d get pissed and immediately think about plot lines not behaving…like I said, a failure.
- Regarding Mr. Roberts Thomas/Thomas Roberts, after his poetry assessment, Mr. H. smiled and inhaled, as if holding down his lunch, and said, “Mr. Thomas, I can think of at least 20 poets in this decade alone, who could kick your ass. Anne Sexton among them.” As a theater teacher he was very dramatic, and Thomas Roberts went kind of white, someone sniggered and I exhaled.
- My first published poem was about a raindrop. (It was college; the 70s.)
- Thomas Roberts dropped the class, and I wrote my first batch of poems which I stuck in a Pee Chee and placed on Mr. H.’s desk, convincing the janitor to let me into his office, “just a second, please” one day after school.
- My Great American Novel was rejected twenty-two times. I buried it in the “Bosom of the Lord” as a famous writer I met at a conference suggested.
- Quick, name five famous accountants.
- Before burying said novel, I squeezed out a handful of poems that won a contest and fifty dollars.
- I got fired from my first writing job. Actually, I quit. It was an internship with the college newspaper. The editor assigned me to cover a budget meeting. It was a boring, death-on-a-stick meeting. The only thing anyone cared about were the Danish and coffee at the back table.
- Quick, name five famous Apostles.
- I wrote about how many times people got up to go to the back coffee table to fill up their styrofoam cups and cut Danish in half. My editor made this face, like he had an ulcer and I was an extra black cup of scalding coffee, when he read it.
- I thought I was Kurt Vonnegut when I was in college.
- Kurt Vonnegut said, “All writers’ wives are beautiful.”
- Mr. H.’s theater burned down one Friday night in October. I remember the following Saturday, we (the cast—broke, idealistic college students) stumbled through the ashes with him for “support.”
- Mr. H. once said, “A library is a church. A home library is a cathedral. Each book is a prayer. “
- I lost my faith in college and found Vonnegut. His books may have been prayers but I’m not sure to which god they were directed.
- Mr. H. was in the vortex of a mid-life crisis. His wife, with his two sons, had just left him. His theater, his lifelong dream had burned to a cinder. He was the first grown man I saw who got crushed so randomly by life. My brother, your dad, was the second. Mr. H. still showed up every day to teach.
- Though his classes were mediocre at best, I learned about the fidelity to a commitment. Sometimes a job is all that holds you up.
- Your dad’s first wife was a lovely woman. She was actually in one of my writing classes my senior year. I introduced them.
- None of my friends were accountants. Not by design. I don’t have any issues with business, I was just attracted to words, music, dance. Your Aunt, my ex, was a dancer; we met in a poetry class. She was a love sonnet in her ballet slippers, so I thought back then. I guess our marriage needed more numbers, so she went back to school, got an MBA. Quit dancing. When we divvied things up, she was great with the numbers; I moved into a basement apartment.
- There’s not much poetry below ground level.
- I had a famous writer tell me once, “As a writer, you will sell out every member of your family.”
- That Saturday morning, I followed Mr. H. like a pet dog, through the smoke, to the stage, now curtain-less. The slats for Fabulous Fable Factory were obliterated, a few skeletons of wood littered the stage like bones.
- Every theater needs an accountant. Hamilton’s box office is flirting with one billion dollars. Note: there are way more accountants than Lin Manuel Mirandas.
- Standing on that burned out stage, wisps of smoke rising like short soliloquies, smelling like a giant ash tray, Mr. H. suddenly turned and looked at me. “I read your poems,” he said, trying to force a smile. “You can’t” and he stopped, raising his hands as if trying to pull the words from the ashes. “It was like,” and he smiled, as if suddenly getting a joke told hours before. “I mean,” and his hands clenched as he looked at me, trying to find the right words. “It was like putting a paper bag over my head and… screaming.”
- As a writer, it’s best to be ambivalent regarding editors. They are as exciting as a dictionary, as necessary as a dung beetle. Those two thoughts are interchangeable, like fuses, or socks.
- Quick, name five famous editors.
- The average book brings in less than 2,000 dollars a year. After you sell to your family, your friends, your in-laws, the one neighbor who wants you to go in on a new fence, the only ones left are the illiterate, the deplorables, and the accountants.
- I wish I was twenty-two again. I’d start a retirement account, take the accounting job with… any firm, write my poems on the weekend, read Vonnegut in between.
- I’ll be glad to critique “whatever.” Email or snail mail.
- I published three of the poems Mr. H. critiqued. I re-wrote them, of course. Re-writing is another kind of prayer.
- P.S. Say “hi” to your dad. I can picture him grunting at the birthday card I sent. The ties that bind also constrict and choke and….
ED MCMANIS is a writer, editor, and erstwhile Head of School. His work has appeared in more than 60 publications, including The Blue Road Reader, California Quarterly, Narrative, and Lascaux Review.
