ABLUTIONS from Patrick deWitt on Vimeo.

I Heart California Admiralradley by user3565540

So I started my summer reading off, with Patrick DeWitt’s “Ablutions”, and just finished the first story in Wells Tower’s “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned.”

It left me feeling the way I do when I am completely swept away by a story, and the world around it. That it wasn’t  just filled with sadness and desperate people made it endearing as did his characters capacity for change. It seems like all I’ve been reading about lately are novels or stories with really desperate no exit type characters.

A bit of an internet search led me to this little chestnut, a Book Trailer for “Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned.” I didn’t know they made book trailers, but I am curious as to the possibilities.

From some insurmountable place

The top of a tree in my old neighborhood

A
Plantation house in the south, standing on the roof

Looking down at the streets I don’t recall anymore

Seeing myself as the younger man

I no longer relate to

Drop me off in my old town

The streets not the way I remember them

One bleeds into another, into the next

A memory here, a misplaced footing here

A romantic embarrassment, the place I called home

Now inhabited by strangers who beat the walls senseless

And roam the streets

Looking for the maps

To places that don’t exist like they were

The people we used to be and the people we’re not

It’s the same everywhere is nowhere about.

Up to a Cow, standing in the muck

looking up at you as if you had all the answers

and silently you disagree

you paddle onward

toward dilapidated buildings,

remnants of the reconstruction

shipwrecked boats

irish skeletons

things you regret now

dipping pen into ink

paddle into muck

skiboats glide past

on ripples you can feel

must be like this for everything we do

not feeling the wake until years later

alone in a classroom on the first day of fall

the morning after a fight

the first day of winter

grabbing onto that paddle

brace yourself

it comes from the bottom and rattles the top

A story, or even an idea can be found hanging on the end of a leaf, or it could be a thin hair tucked at the back of your tongue that won’t be spit out. That we can’t understand how or why certain things reveal themselves to us only makes the challenge of getting them down even greater. But in order to get to that point, we have to be open to it. When we first write, the first thing we discover is just how many rules there are in this mad cap game of writing, and all of these rules can make the whole bother of inspiration all the more troubling.

You the writer need to fold the laundry, you have to cook the meals, change the diapers. You need to think about the decisions that need to be made, and these can’t be rushed

And after awhile you discover that you can more or less do what you want, that it’s the craft of writing that’s the important part, that the rules lie in convention, how sturdy the frame your story is contained in. This idea you have, this want inside of you to make it something new, and not have it ring false, is a force you must respect, must have patience for so it can ring out of you clear as a bell. Some will say to obliterate all clichés in your writing, but if we don’t sometimes use cliché as a way to open up the footholds the reader has to reality and use them as a stepping stone, what would we have left but a mess of intangibles, a void made more abstract by opaque language?

You spend time away from a story, from the day to day kick in the ass struggle to even get up off the ground from the previous day’s writing, and though it might seem at the time dangerous to spend a little time away from the story, while you are away the good stuff in your mind floats up to the surface, so nothing is lost. This goes for ideas, dialogue, a well executed line, all of this is embedded in fabric of the idea itself, It’s the mental work that will uncover it. What’s taken time for me is to figure out is that it never has to go away, if it means anything to the creator.

The time spent away from a project is just as important as the time spent in a project. You the writer can write yourself into a corner, in the name of writing everyday. You the writer need to fold the laundry, you have to cook the meals, change the diapers. You need to think about the decisions that need to be made, and these can’t be rushed.

There is meaning in everything and sometimes we don’t know why we write what we write, we can’t see the big picture in the small moments of our stories. So sometimes by folding the laundry, doing the dishes, we come to know why what we write makes sense. And if you never pause to look at how it works in the grand scheme of things, then you the writer are doing all the thinking for the reader, because you are too much in both worlds.

So this dream I had a few years ago, a big southern dream with big southern houses. Loads of Mississippi kudzu and lush green workplaces with design firms magazines fashion and journalism, and all the time, the Mom and Son are a little too close in proximity and familiarity, its as if in a way he provides all the companionship from the loss of the father, the kids doesn’t really remember, or at least half of him does, but chooses not to on a regular basis. So all is well, all is idyllic until a man comes along, and then the boy, who is incredibly prudish and naïve then has to figure out the ways of the world, all through his mother, the source of goodness and kindness so far in this life.

In the dream it’s so real and has everything I miss about the South, in it. Like the one  time I shared a downstairs of a house I shared with a friend, a big old creaking thing, with pillars at the front on frat boy row in Columbia, SC. The room I slept in was an old porch, and every morning that summer, the sun up shining through the kudzu, the reptillian shades of green, light and dark and hot, and its those connections between dreams and reality that keep us going creatively, a constant connection between the past, present and imagined.