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.

'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.

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.

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.

Why the long face, Mr. Fiction Writer?

Over at The Missouri Review's blog, I contemplate why in fiction I'm drawn to what's beautiful and sad.

In which I humbly acknowledge the smarts of a Towson U. English major

The Greatest Show is launched. Reveled at the mega-conference for writers, AWP (more on that to come), and tonight I'm home after a reading on the campus where I teach. Many friends in the room, and students, and former students. One of the best things about the night? An English major in our secondary education track introduced me and the book. I had no idea what she'd say, but she nailed it. The book is exactly what she says. We make 'em pretty good at Towson U.

Here's her intro: 

Michael Downs is an English Professor here at Towson University. His first book, House of Good Hope, won the 2007 River Teeth prize for literary nonfiction, and today he’s going to be reading for us from his new collection of short stories; The Greatest Show, which was inspired by the famous 1944 Hartford circus fire. I personally had never heard of the fire before reading the book, and wasn’t sure what to expect from it.

The first story, Ania, immediately caught my attention and pulled at my heart. I found myself immersed in the life of a hard working Polish woman, who was new to America, and desperate to give her 3 year old son a happy life. So desperate, in fact, that she stole tickets to the circus from her employer. Little did she know that the decision to steal those tickets would change her life, and the life of her son, Teddy, forever.

Although the fire inspired the stories, once submerged in the book I found that the fire wasn’t the main focus. It was about people; Ania, Teddy, Nick, Franco, Lena, and so many other characters were left with scars from the circus that day. But without the fire, Nick and Lena may have never married and Franco would have never been born. Without the fire, Suzanne would have never gone to the strange woman with the scar, Mrs. Liszak, when she was in need. 

In the stories, Michael Downs takes us from the circus fire in 1944, to September 11^th 2001, and after. He shows us the connections that exist between events, and between people, and that we all live each day without realizing that we have our own role in the greatest show.

Thanks, Toni Townsend.

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.

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.

Introducing our new CFO and mascot

This is Big Top Monkey.
    My wife found him at a local craft store. We were looking for an ink stamp that I could use to gussy up my letter press broadsides (see previous blog post). I like Big Top Monkey so much that I might use him to stamp copies of the book when I'm asked to sign it. So, we've all got that to look forward to.
    He's also my new computer desktop wallpaper and my Facebook profile pic.
    Give him a warm round of applause, will you?

Hot type

A typo. Can you catch it?

    I don’t text.
    Which reason would you like? There are so many. How about these: all those thumbs, all thos misspeled words. LOL. :) I compulsively edit my Facebook status reports. How could I bear to text?
    There are other reasons.

    Yet texting is like typing, you say. You build words and sentences a letter at a time.

    No, I say, it is not like typing. I learned to type a long time ago. I use all eight fingers and both thumbs. It’s easy to delete a line and write a new one.

    I don’t text, but I thought a lot about that the other day, when I built a paragraph of 172 words out of metal, letter by letter.

The type drawer

    Let me start again.

***

    For all of June, I was fortunate enough to be a writer-in-residence at the Anderson Center in Red Wing, Minnesota. This meant that I lived with four other artists and writers in a big house, ca. 1914, ate dinner prepared nightly by a chef, and worked to revise a novel. I wrote every day, missed my wife and dogs, and once went into town to see the world’s largest boot.

    You can read more about the Anderson Center here. It has a compelling history, and it has made a real difference for the arts in Minnesota, nationally, and internationally. The grounds of the center also include an alternative high school and a small independent publisher called Red Dragonfly Press.

    Scott King runs Red Dragonfly. He publishes mostly poetry, and quite a few of the books are done in the modern way: designed and typeset on computers. But equally important to the operation are his 19th-century printing technologies. In the old way, Scott casts letters out of metal, arranges them as words and poems, and then applies ink to press them into elegant, old-style pages and books. This is, in the old parlance, hot type. (Current publishing uses cold computer type).

    Scott was kind enough to instruct me in this traditional fashion of typesetting and then let me have at it. With his help, I assembled 959 characters of Dante font, 12-point type, with spaces, one tiny piece of metal at a time. It took me 2½ hours just to build the paragraph.

   “That’s pretty fast for a first time,” he said. “You might be a natural.”

   Isn’t this like texting?

   Sort of not.

***

Scott positions the hot type on the press

    Back in another life, when I was first learning the newspaper trade, we were taught to count headlines. We were allowed so many spaces in a column, and that count changed depending on the size (points) of the letters. So, a capital W (huge width) was worth two points. A lower case i was worth a half. You wrote your headline, then added up the count to see if your words would fit.

    This practice was a remnant from the days of using hot type. Letters and words do have physical properties: widths, heights, and, in hot type, even weights. In composing my paragraph metal letter by metal letter, I was reminded of this.

Hours later...

    It’s good, sometimes, to get back to the beginnings of things. I took up hunting to learn what it meant to kill, gut, skin and butcher an animal before eating it. It seemed an important thing to understand if I continued to pull shiny packages of meat off grocery store shelves. Likewise, I know photographers who believe it is important to learn the practices of a darkroom, even in these days of point-shoot-Flickr.

    I would like my creative writing students to one day build their sentences out of metal. I want them to understand the weight of letters and words. They would learn which words are truly extraneous. They would come to value use over utilize. They would learn that to build your words from metal, you must love them.

Book!

I'm pleased to announce that Louisiana State University Press has decided to publish my story collection The Greatest Show as the Spring 2012 book in its Yellow Shoe fiction series.

Why Yellow Shoe? As editor Rand Dotson tells me, the name is from someone misunderstanding LSU fiction as "Yellow Shoe" fiction. I like a press with a sense of humor. Thanks to the good folks at LSU, and especially to Michael Griffith, the series editor, for choosing my manuscript.

Should I read Water for Elephants? Or not?

Circus literature in the news:

1. Water for Elephants, the mega-historical-hit novel, is about to be released as a mega-historical-hit movie.

2. Death-Defying Acts, a poetry collection of testimonies from circus performers, is a finalist for a national award given to books from independent publishers.

Which am I more likely to read? The novel? Or the poetry?

The poetry.

I’d very much like to read the poetry. The publisher, Wordfarm, is a fine young press that first made an impression in my home when my wife brought home a book called Bright Shoots of Everlastingness. It had a stunning cover and essays that included one that had appeared in Best American Religious Writing. Since then, Wordfarm has also published Alan Michael Parker’s funny, tender novel Whale Man.

Why I’m less likely to read Water for Elephants I can’t exactly say. Something about my reluctance feels like insecurity. The book is a big hit. It’s fiction about a circus. I’ve written fiction about a circus. Why compare? When I was working on House of Good Hope, I one day saw another book that put a cold lump in my gut. The Pact was, like HOGH, about city kids making a promise to return to the broken city they love. Their city was Newark; I wrote Hartford. In The Pact, the young men all return home and become medical professionals. It’s a true story, but it seems to me less true to life than the more complicated ending of HOGH. But The Pact has sold better. Much better. It may well be a better book than HOGH, but I haven’t read it.

I tell myself I need to read The Pact. I tell myself to read Water for Elephants. A friend once gave me a novel called The Aerialist. It’s about a circus. My friend recommended it. I should read that one, too. After all, the guy who designs Chevy’s mini-vans must look at Ford’s.

But then I tell myself: chill. Competition in the writing world might follow a different model. Sprinters on a track and field team don’t watch each other. The other runners are a distraction. Instead, runners focus on their own form. They rely on their strengths and try to mitigate their weaknesses. They study and practice and study and practice and when the gun goes off go like hell.

And I do study. All the time I read stories that inspire awe, stories about a serial killer called The Misfit, or a shell-shocked soldier in Italy, or an Irish woman who wants to write about Chekhov and oysters. Those gold-medal stories make me want to clear my desk, open the laptop and aspire.

Still, I wonder. What do other writers do? Read the contemporary books that are like theirs? Or not?

The shortlist for the Scott Prize

Here's some great good news. My short story collection manuscript, The Greatest Show, is on the shortlist for The Scott Prize, an award that carries publication with the fine independent press, SALT Publishing.

SALT is an international publisher, headquartered in the U.K., with a bunch of great books and writers in its catalogue. Congrats to all those who made the shortlist. I've checked you all out, and I’m feeling lucky to have my manuscript among yours.

The Greatest Show came out of my unending fascination with my hometown, Hartford, Connecticut, and its history. On July 6, 1944, a fire erupted during a matinee performance inside a Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus tent, killing more than 160 people and injuring hundreds more. My father would have been inside the tent that day had his divorced parents not argued and his mother kept him from an outing with his dad. Years later, when I was an adult, the fire still haunted Hartford's cultural consciousness. My stories grow out of that haunting.

My gratitude goes to the folks at SALT.

Back inside the tent

from Charlie Chaplin's movie, The Circus

This blog started as an experiment, a high-wire walk with no practice and no net. What did I know of blogging? Nada. But I stepped out there and fell and climbed back up and learned something. Then, I pulled the curtains.

It was time for a new show. For more than two years my blogging mojo has gone into HimPlus17, where my wife and I chat about our age difference (I’m 17 years younger).

But I’ve kept this blog in reserve, mostly for the title. It’s the same as a short story collection I’ve been dreaming up. Someday, I thought, I might need a venue for news about the manuscript as it became a book.

Not quite there yet. But that collection is finished ... and I’m hopeful, especially now. Why?

Here’s a hint.