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