My father didn't go to the circus

Edw. H. Downs, Age 3

On the day of the fire, July 6, 1944, Ed Downs (then called Ned) was three years old and his parents were already separated and on their way to divorce. My grandfather came by the house to pick up my father, planning an afternoon at the circus. He and my grandmother argued. Who knows the reason. You’re not taking him anywhere! she said.

Hundreds of people did go, though. One hundred sixty-eight died. Ned stayed home, missed out, survived, thank God.

Years later, my Irish great aunts would make the sign of the cross during family gatherings. They’d say, “Thank God that Ned didn’t go to the circus that day.”

That’s the family story. Perhaps the story is apocryphal. When last I mentioned it to my father, he said he didn’t remember hearing it. But I did hear it, years ago. He might have told me. Or maybe his brother did.

Someone must have told me that story. Because the story is the reason I made the main character in The Greatest Show a three-year-old boy when he and his mother go to the circus. That’s the age my father would have been had he gone. In my head, I sent another three-year-old boy in my father’s place. A famous writer I’ve heard speak has often instructed, “Don’t write about what happened in your family. Write about what you fear might have happened.” So when I sat down to write about the circus fire, I created a little boy named Teddy.

…[S]uddenly he’s toppling off the bleachers, falling through air, a little boy in summer shorts and shoes with laces knotted twice, plummeting through heat and the rush of air, too young even to imagine that there is something called death. On the ground his body won’t work anymore. Bits of straw tickle his nose. He can’t move. Heat like the most savage cold weighs on him, and the weight eats away his clothes, invades his skin and the skin under his skin. What’s worse is the fear, his trembling heart, the emerging awareness that his mother is not the world, and that the world hates him.

Ned Downs never made it to that circus. So I sent Teddy instead.

Bóg dał, Bóg wziął

Bóg dał, Bóg wziął. That’s a Polish proverb, included on the dedication page for House of Good Hope, just beneath my grandparents’ names. It means “God gives, God takes.” Walt and Helen Petry both were dead by the time the book was published in 2007. Thus.

The phrase came to mind the day before Christmas when House of Good Hope’s publisher returned publication rights to me. This means the book is out of print and the publisher will make it no more. Theirs was a business decision I understood. It took four years to sell the first print run–a slow unraveling. The press offered to keep the book available in a single e-edition (via Barnes and Noble). I asked them to commit to full publication or give me back the rights, per our contract. The publisher’s terse reply arrived amidst a few holiday cards. “This letter will serve as official notice...” etc. I was disappointed that it had not begun, “Dear Michael.”

So now, HOGH has gone out of print just as The Greatest Show is poised to come into the world. Sad irony, that.

After I read the letter, I poured a nip of Scotch and toasted the book. Then I wandered room to room, as if the mail had brought news of the death of an old friend I once knew well but hadn’t talked with in a few years.

House of Good Hope was a necessary book for me to write. It wasn’t cut out to be a big seller, that I knew, but without it, I’d never have gotten my current job as a professor teaching creative writing. More importantly, I’d never have had friendships with the men who are the book’s primary characters. I made the book with the hope that it would honor the memory of my grandparents and give my family an historical record. Likewise, I wanted to create something Hiram, Eric, Derrick, Joshua, and Harvey could give their children to say, “This was your father once.” I wanted to write something that praised Hartford as a place worth our attention. I wanted to better understand why we leave places we love and what price is paid when we do.

All of that sounds like a eulogy, but it isn’t, because HOGH isn’t dead. The book has come home, its rights mine again to do with as I please. My literary agent encouraged this path. He mentioned the ease of creating a Kindle edition, how simple it is to create a print-on-demand copy. His agency could help. Why let the book languish?

So now, House of Good Hope is out of print and poised to return if I so choose. I can revise it if I want, or not, or update it, or not. Or maybe years from now another publisher will ask for it. Maybe it will just sit for a while, not languishing, but waiting, because how God gives and takes, and in what order, and how often, is always a mystery, and who knows what comes next?

The Greatest Show, on film

Annabelle

I  dreamed of clowns reading sentences from my book. These dreams were visual with no sound or narrative coherence. As with all dreams, they felt perfect and unrealized. The clowns all looked happy and friendly, and they recited sad sentences about the Hartford circus fire. Ah. Irony.

Months later, hundreds of miles from home, I squatted in the hallway of an old factory, holding a dry-erase board where I had written, “It’s all pain, right?” and a clown named Annabelle recited that line as my friend Brian filmed her and recorded the sound.

“So how does a little clowning make anything worse?”

“Let’s do another one closer,” Brian said.

I’m no filmmaker. To realize my dream of clowns and sad sentences, I telephoned my friend, Brian McDermott. Brian lives in Massachussets and teaches videography and journalism at UMass-Amherst. We met when he was a student in classes I taught at the University of Montana. But he’s a talented photographer and writer who didn’t need to be taught anything, really. He always knew what to do with a photograph or a video or a story.

Writers don’t have many opportunities for artistic collaboration. There’s only one chair at most desks, and that’s where we work. But ever since a stint at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, I’ve thought more and more about collaboration. While at VCCA, I spent lots of time talking with visual artists and composers, and their ideas about art were exciting and in many ways, for me, new. Later, I noted how Ron Tanner, a writer and friend, put together a book trailer for which he did the animation, gathered friends to read different parts, and asked another friend, who is a marvelous composer, to write an accompanying music score. What Ron did was something new — literary but also a different art altogether. It was, I suppose, that most collaborative of arts: a film.

That’s what I wanted for my happy clowns reciting sad sentences.

And that’s how I found myself holding onto a dry erase board and saying, “Maybe a little slower this time?”

Chris Oakley

As the dream unfolded, it took on the idiosyncracies of those other dreammakers. Once, I’d imagined an array of clowns soberly and in normal voices reading my sentences. But Nettie Lane, aka Annabelle, had her own ideas and Annabelle had her own voice. She had read the entire stories from which her lines came, and she gave them nuances and subtle and strange, delightful intepretations I’d never have been able to imagine. Brian had recommended using performers other than clowns, and had even found the circus studio to provide them. So that afternoon we also worked with a trapeze artist and a contortionist. The trapeze artist suggested she recite while hanging upside down.

And Brian? Brian’s mind never stopped working. He suggested we vary the backgrounds (“There’s a spot with a sign that reads, ‘Not an Exit,’ “ he said), and in every case he chose well. He wanted to shoot B-roll of the performers performing to edit into the readings. He directed them to face light. From behind the camera, he laughed and encouraged.

Two hours later, we were done.

Then it was Brian’s turn to sit alone at the desk. He combed the internet for royalty-free music. He edited with care. He sent me several versions to approve. I began to notice how he married images to words, how he used images as transitions. I saw my script and my unrealized dream of clowns become something else – and that something often contradicted my own visions. But it was far better than anything I could have imagined on my own.

Born from my book, but something else entirely. Something new. It is a trailer, and so it is a marketing tool in service to The Greatest Show. But it stands alone, too, I think, as the collaboration of five artists, thrilling and disturbing in its own ways.

Here it is.

The View from My Keyboard

Here is where I play with my imaginary friends

My good pal Patty McNair has put a great spin on the idea of a writer's blog by featuring writers' workspaces. She calls it View from the Keyboard, and in it she includes pictures and short essays featuring the spaces where writers put together their words.  I'm glad that she invited me to contribute. She says some nice things about me, too, and if any one of them proves to be true, I'm super grateful.


While you're checking out my workspace at her blog, you might also take a look at her new short story collection, The Temple of Air. It got a great review from Booklist, the American Library Association's magazine, and it's on my list of must-reads.

Ladies and Gentlemen! Boys and Girls! It's a cover!

Many, many thanks to Laura Gleason, the design and production manager at LSU Press, for this stunning work.