Introducing Barney and Gienka of Meriden, Connecticut.

If you enjoyed Ania and Charlie, I'd like to introduce you to Barney and Gienka. They are the parents of John Surowiecki, a Connecticut poet. They are also the hero and heroine of the book, Barney and Gienka. I finished the book this past weekend, but I haven't left their neighborhood, mostly post-war Meriden, where what matters is Jell-O, backyard telescopes, and nurses with false teeth. The tenderness, poignancy, and humor are all perfectly pitched. And the language is efficient and expansive and delightful.

Moreover, one of the people you meet has the world's best name: Mr. Szmykleszczwladeczaryniecki.

I know just enough Polish to convince myself that I have successfully pronounced this name. Several times. I think I should get a prize.

Here is my review of the book, which I posted on Goodreads:

What a joy are Barney and Gienka and the people who make up their Polish-American community in Meriden, CT. This book is a neighborhood, viewed with tenderness and honesty by a writer and son who sees the subtle ways in which love succeeds and fails, and how people find consolation in a television movie, a cabbage garden, a bowl of Jell-O. Funny, sad, and beautiful, this book reminds us of what is extraordinary in an ordinary life.

I don't know how much attention this book has received in Connecticut. I think it should get a lot. There and everywhere.

Read one of the poems here.

  

A camp for kids like The Greatest Show's Teddy Liszak, only real.

“A tattoo is something you get on your skin because it means something to you. A scar you get because something happened,” he said. “It’s a better story — it isn’t something you can control, but you get through it and you handle it."

Read The Washington Posts's story about a camp for kids with burn scars here.

A friend recommends...

Ron Tanner is a wonderful writer (check out his book covers, below) and a good friend who recently recommended The Greatest Show to online readers of the literary journal West Branch, published by Bucknell University.

Ron's close read of the stories is spot on, and he revealed things about the book I hadn't even known. That happens. Writers are not the sole masters of our material. Readers always get the final say. Which is part of the fun.

Art talk on video

... from the Maryland State Arts Council.

'Show' places in six-way tie behind Louise Erdrich

The Greatest Show was recently named one of six finalists for the Paterson Prize for Fiction, an award won this year by Louise Erdrich and her novel, The Round House. The Round House also won the National Book Award, proving once again that Erdrich is, well, phenomenal. For years I've been teaching her first book, Love Medicine, to students at Towson University, and every time the book astonishes me in fresh ways. I'll be glad to open The Round House, too.

The other finalists for the Paterson Prize include
• All That I Am (HarperCollins) by Anna Funder
• Girlchild (FSG) by Tupelo Hassman
• The Collective (W.W. Norton) by Don Lee
• The Lower River (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) by Paul Theroux
• Fat Girl, Terrestrial (University of Alabama Press) by Kellie Wells.

The Paterson Prize is awarded by the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College in New Jersey.

Thank God we are always surprised

The Maryland State Arts Council asked me to give a keynote talk for its reception honoring artists who'd received grants from the agency this year. They didn't tell me I'd have to follow Blessed Sheriff, a 15-year-old poetry-reciting phenom.


But follow Blessed I did, and true to my name, (which, you'll recall is Downs as in downer), I chose to meditate on what it means to celebrate art and artists in a time of Boston Marathon bombings and Sandy Hook shootings. Baltimore Fishbowl, an energetic news site that I love to read, published my remarks.

If you have only time for one, choose Blessed. She's something.

Words and Music!

The Greatest Show's next appearance is on Thursday, May 2, at VisArts in Rockville, MD. HearArts is a series that puts writers and musicians in the same room for an evening's entertainment. Here's the link for more information.

A review from Hartford by way of Colorado

The Colorado Review's fall issue includes a three-page review of The Greatest Show. The writer,  Jennifer Wisner Kelly, has family history in Hartford, and she begins by telling about her grandmother's decision that July 6, 1944 was too hot a day to take her son--Jennifer's father--to the circus. This moment has become family lore, Kelly writes, known as The Near Miss. "How might everyone's lives have shifted," she writes, "if Grandma had gone to the circus?"

I'm grateful that someone with Hartford roots reviewed the book. I think it's the first time that's happened. And I'm glad that Jennifer Wisner Kelly enjoyed the read. She ends...

Downs's stories are invariably rich and mature. There is nothing rushed here. He savors his characters, descriptions, and details. He effortlessly inhabits the lives, over six decades, of Hartford's citizens--it's immigrants; its wealthy; its men, women, and children--and drills deep inside his character's thought processes, self-analyses, and epiphanies. Downs resists easy answers to complex human questions, but gives enough resolution in each story to satisfy. The Greatest Show gorgeously captures the sweep of ordinary lives made remarkable by a tragic twist of fate.

The Next Big Thing

The Next Big Thing is a game of literary tag. Writers answer a few questions about a work-in-progress, then tag other writers, who do the same, tagging more writers and more– forever. It’s like a chain letter, or a pyramid scheme for people who have no money.

Ron Tanner, as full of skill and talent and generosity as anyone you'll ever meet, tagged me. I’ll tell you about my latest project starting with the next paragraph. And I’m tagging Patricia McNair (The Temple of Air), Steve Yates (Morkan’s Quarry and Some Kinds of Love), and Elisabeth Dahl (Genie Wishes) who will tell you about theirs.

What is the working title of your novel?

That’s a great question, because the answer changes by the minute. You can help decide. Which of the titles below most entices you. Put your answer in a comment.

a. The Genius of Pain

b. Wells

c. Painless

d. The Strange True Tale of the Surgeon Dentist, Horace Wells

e. Better keep thinking, hombre.

Horace Wells

Where did the idea come from for the novel?

While researching a scene for a novel that wasn’t working, I re-discovered the story of Horace Wells, a 19^th-century dentist from my hometown who is widely credited with “inventing anesthesia.” I say that I “re-discovered” his story because what I had known about Horace was only part of his history. My awareness was limited to what you’d expect of a kid who mostly knew Horace as a bigger-than-life statue at Bushnell Park: inventor of anesthesia, benefactor of humanity, Christian son of Christian citizens, etc. But now I was also learning about his “melancholy” and his addiction to chloroform, and about that night he spent with prostitutes in Manhattan, and about the publicity war he waged against a former student and rival to win credit as the sole inventor of “painless surgery.”

I cranked out a novel synopsis in three days and sent it to my agent. Drop the other project, he told me. Write this one.

What genre does your manuscript fall under?

Historical literary fiction

Which actor would you choose to play your character in a movie rendition?

Give him mutton chops, and yeah, Jessie Eisenberg (The Social Network) could play Horace. Another troubled genius for his resumé.

What is a one-sentence synopsis of your book?

GENIUS OF PAIN is an historical novel that fictionalizes the life and death of Horace Wells, a 19^th-century dentist and anesthesia pioneer, who was addicted to the gases he used for humanity’s benefit.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

The first draft took about a year, but it would have taken longer if I hadn’t been able to spend three weeks at a writer’s retreat cranking out the last 100+ pages.

What other books would you compare your story to within this genre?

I’m trying to write a wide-ranging historical literary novel, so readers of 19^th-century books such as The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde might enjoy this story. Recent practitioners who have inspired me include Peter Carey (Oscar and Lucinda or his more recent Parrot and Olivier in America), William Kennedy (Quinn’s Book) and Edward P. Jones (The Known World).

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

Horace himself. He and his life are much richer and more complicated than I’d been led to imagine as a schoolboy, and his secrets and torments and successes all raise questions that still seem relevant to humans in pain. To be human is to hurt, and to seek solace, whether that be in meditation or ether or heroin or Vicodin. So much about our pain and its relief is a mystery. Horace explored all that, and he’s helping me do it, too.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

Here’s a sneak-preview of the first few sentences:

“The girl whimpered, then yawned a stuttering low moan, and had you been among those in the room with her and her festering tooth on that November day in 1844, you would have been cowed by her pain, awed and struck dumb. The month had been unseasonably warm and bright, and earlier that morning a groundskeeper had enjoyed the weather as he wiped the windows clean; now a cracked pane left a bent shadow sharp on the floor boards. In the low sun’s blue-yellow light, on a table pushed against a bare wall, a dentist’s tool kit lay open but not yet used.”

Goucher College II

Post-Sandy, The Greatest Show's Goucher College appearance is rescheduled for Election Day, Nov. 6.

Vote, and then swing by Van Meter Hall, room 101, at 1:30 p.m.

Captured on film at the Mark Twain House

On that July 6 evening in Hartford, the 68th anniversary of the circus fire, when I read from The Greatest Show at the Mark Twain House, a local public affairs network was there to film. The Connecticut Network has made the video available. If you weren't there and you'd care to watch, you can by clicking here.

Stylin'

Mr. Boh, mayor of the Land of Pleasant Living

The book blog of Baltimore's Style magazine -- Baltimore Book Talk -- offers this new review of The Greatest Show. Thanks Celeste Sollod! If we ever meet, I'll buy you a Natty Boh.

$@###%!**!

One of my favorite book blogs, The Quivering Pen, has published a mini-essay I wrote about the challenge I sometimes face–to cry or to curse–when I give public readings from my work. Here's an excerpt:


 Put me in front of a group of interested listeners, and ask me to read from something that has been part of my life for so long­­­–over which I’ve worried/exulted/banged my head–and my throat will tighten.  My eyes will burn and sometimes tear.  I’ll swallow hard, as if to keep down a “Holy Sh-t.” 


I promise, the whole essay is rated G. I'd let my goddaughter read it, if she could read.

And you, reader, might want to check out more of The Quivering Pen. David Abrams, whose forthcoming Iraq war novel, Fobbit, has been called an "instant classic" by Publishers Weekly, offers several gems a week about books new and old. Here's two of my favorites, in which David remembers two of his (and mine, and probably several other people's) favorite writers: Lewis "Buddy" Nordan and Flannery O'Connor.


Bonus tidbit: David lives in Butte, America, hometown of Evel Knievel, and he makes the best shrimp and grits in Montana.

Foreword!

Foreword Reviews magazine just made my day.

There and Back Again

Not since 1992 have I lived in Hartford or Connecticut. That’s twenty years elsewhere from the city where I was born, where my grandparents and great grandparents are buried, where my Mom and Dad met while she waitressed at a Friendly’s and he took lunch breaks from his job pumping gas, where I scribbled notes as high school athletes dunked or wrestled or leapt.

But every day, I’ve written my way back home.

It’s peculiar, making literature about a place while far from it. With mailing addresses in Arkansas, Montana, or Baltimore, I’ve nevertheless lived in Hartford every day.

 • At Hartford Public High School and in the city’s North End and at my grandparents’ kitchen table via House of Good Hope…

• At the Civic Center and Elizabeth Park and Weaver H.S. via The Greatest Show…

Now I’m almost done with a novel set in 1840s Hartford, dreaming familiar place names–Asylum Avenue, Dutch Point–into a long-ago reality.

That’s not the same as my body being in Hartford, of course, except that sometimes it is. Now and then, the Hartford I imagine becomes so real, and I see so precisely its detail, that a glance to the window reveals a Montana or a Baltimore that looks no more true than a landscape on a movie screen.

William Kennedy, a favorite author and inspiration, writes exclusively about Albany, New York. He also lives there. Sees it every day. Still, I can picture him looking away from his desk and feeling a moment of disorientation that he’s not in his imagined city. He notes in an essay that the Albany portrayed in his books isn’t the same as the Albany where people live. “It’s my Albany,” he says, and that distinction makes sense to me.

Bank Square Books in Mystic

My Hartford isn’t Hartford. But maybe it’s close enough to fool people that it’s their Hartford the same way it sometimes fools me.

It’s also true that writing my way home doesn’t only happen in my head. This Saturday, for example, May 5 from 1-3 p.m., I’ll be signing copies at a fantastic indie bookstore, Bank Square Books in Mystic. Later in the summer, on July 6, the anniversary of the circus fire, I’ll read at the Mark Twain House in Hartford.

Thanks to Annie Philbrick at Bank Square Books and Steve Courtney at the Mark Twain House for the homecomings.

Where M. Twain lived, Hartford

A rump-de-diddly fanfare!

Among the cool things about the 21st-century is that not only do you get to write a book, and not only do you get to help make a short film based on the book (sometimes called a book trailer), but you also get to put together a soundtrack for the book. 

Which was not as easy as I'd thought it would be.

But I tried. And now, thanks to the music and literature blog Largehearted Boy, everyone can know exactly what tune I had in my head when I wrote the grand finale circus scene in the story, "The Greatest Show." (Lest you think the choice was some ironic and hip pick like The Trammps' "Disco Inferno," it's not... because "ironic and hip" isn't a suit I wear.) You can also argue with my choices of music to go with "Mrs. Liszak" or "Son of Captain America," or "History Class."

So here you go: a little Jiminy Cricket, a little Derek Trucks, a little Benny Goodman, and a little Schoolhouse Rock.

The first review....

Passed. Phew.

A gryphon? A unicorn? A novel-in-stories? Some other strange beast?

If you happened to be listening to WYPR's Maryland Morning this a.m., you may have heard me chatting with Tom Hall about the book. (If you didn't, you can listen here.

At the start of the interview, Tom referred to the book's opening, which I've been calling "a story", as "the first chapter." Time and again he said, "Chapter," and I said "story." And then he noted that the front of the book says, The Greatest Show: Stories, but that he thought he was actually reading a novel. He said he couldn't imagine reading the stories out of order, as he might in what is usually advertised as a short story collection. So he asked: What is this book?

Last fall, I sat on a panel at the Baltimore Writers Conference, which panel also included Susi Wyss and Jerry Gabriel, who have both written books that include linked short stories. We talked about the linked stories in general and this question in particular. Jerry's in Drowned Boy are linked. He said so. Susi calls her book, The Civilized World, a "novel-in-stories." She points out what she thinks is a significant difference (and I'm paraphrasing here): that a novel-in-stories has a definitive narrative arc from the first story to the last. That arc, I think, might be one of plot or one of character, but the stories taken together do make for an experience akin to reading a novel, one of developing characters and tension that leads to a climactic and fulfilling experience at the end.

So, Edward Jones' stories, linked by place in All Aunt Hagar's Children and Lost in the City, are purely linked stories because there's not so much a rising arc of development. Winesburg, Ohio, in which we watch George Willard grow and change and eventually leave home, would be more "novel-in-stories."

Tom Hall pointed out, via a tongue-in-cheek definition from writer Chris Offutt, that a novel-in-stories might actually be best defined as a book that hoodwinks readers into buying a short story collection.

And that may be true, too.

In poetry, forms follow particular conventions. A villanelle is not a sonnet. There are clear differences in the number of lines and how the lines are structured. Even the parts of a poem are easily differentiated: a couplet is clearly not a tercet.


Fiction is more amorphous, but we still sometimes talk about the forms as if we want fiction to be like poetry; we crave definition. These sorts of arguments (is it a novella or a long story? A novel-in-stories or linked stories? A short short or a micro-fiction) are entertaining, sometimes, but I'm not sure they are terrifically useful. Fiction in all its forms is so wildly irregular. A novel is 1,000 pages or 150. It's in first person or omniscient or third or a mix.


Then, it seems, the question is less about what a book of fiction is, how we define it, and who is doing the defining. Does that work belong to the writer, the publisher, the reader?


Yes.


A writer's intention might be to write a book of linked stories in the tradition of Dubliners, then find that an agent or a publisher "a novel" and the reader decides, "These are really just stories."


As I told Tom, my intention with The Greatest Show was to write stories. I didn't even know at first that I was writing a book. But when I figured that out, I began to knit the stories together and even to write some stories specifically to fit the book. I intended to write stories. I didn't have the experience of writing a novel. I'm doing that now. It's different.


Yet, when I write stories I do hope to grab something of the novel's largeness, of the sense that something in the lives of my character's is huge and changing, perhaps for all time. Maybe that's why my stories are so often long. And maybe a bunch of stories that try for something novelistic -- and are linked by character and place and tragedy -- gives a book the feel of a novel.

So what is The Greatest Show? A novel? Novel-in-stories? A collection of linked short stories? 

If you read it, maybe you'll let me know.

Scenes from the birth of a book

Proud papa at the LSU Press booth, AWP-Chicago, for the book's birth

 

 

Grad school pals Alison Pelegrin (poet) and Tom Franklin (novelist) at AWP

Book launch cake! (carrot, oh my yes)

Greg Sesek of Ivy Bookstore enabling readers at the book launch party

First live-bookstore reading at One More Page Books in Arlington, VA

My childhood neighbor from Connecticut showed up! Kristine bought three copies. She's an example for us all.

from the parents and brother and sister, adding to the festivities

In Fayetteville, Arkansas, at Nighbird books with Donald "Skip" Hays, my thesis director, and his wife Patty

with Lisa Sharp, owner of Nightbird Books in Fayetteville, a store with real songbirds indoors

In Oxford, Mississippi, with Sheri at William Faulkner's house.

with novelist Jennifer DuBois and all-around fabulous writer Tom Franklin, preparing to read at the Oxford Conference for the Book

Ole Miss indoors

Oxford outdoors: The justly famous Square Books

Woooo Pig!

The Greatest Show is about to return to the land of its birth, Fayetteville, Arkansas, and I'm calling all my fellow Hogs. I'll read at Nightbird Books on Monday night, and some good folk in the community's press corp have taken note. Thanks to Kyle Kellams of KUAF radio and Michelle Parks of CityWire for their careful attention to the book. Click here for Kyle's March 15 Ozarks at Large radio report and here for Michelle's feature story.