How awesome is this book? Going back over the places I’ve marked, I’m still amazed. These were too good not to share, even if they are too long for tweeting or status updating.
“As I repeatedly went forth with him and began to understand the ignorance and contradictions and language difficulties with which he contended, and the doubtful sources of his information and the seemingly bottomless history and darkness out of which the dishes of New York emerge, the deeper grew my suspicion that his work finally consisted of minting or perpetuating and in any event circulating misconceptions about his subject and in this way adding to the endless perplexity of the world.”
“We are in the realm not of logic but of wistfulness, and I must maintain that wistfulness is a respectable, serious condition. How, otherwise, to account for much of one’s life?”
“She had decided that I could handle the truth, or that I should handle it. I did, just about. And though I cannot say it made me stronger, I have the comfort of knowing, with the benefit of hard-won hindsight, that something is going right if I am a little nervous as to what my wife may say next.”
Wish me luck. The winner receives round-trip travel to Montreal, a stay at a bed-and-breakfast, honorarium, publication, a reception, and VIP pass to the Pop Montreal Festival. All of this is pretty exciting and I’m thrilled to be up for final consideration. There’s something about free travel being included in a prize that really gets me going–and returning to Montreal would be that much more special.
The debut issue of Portland, OR journal Weekday came out last week and features my story “The Man Who Never Was.” Copies can be ordered at this link or purchased (and printed!) from the Publication Studio storefront in Portland at 717 SW Ankeny.
Weekday is the official journal of Publication Studio, “an experiment in sustainable publication” that prints and binds books on demand while tending to the public space of the book in ways that go beyond how we typically think of the market. It’s a pretty cool idea.
Since returning from AWP in early April, I’ve been preparing to query agents, and I’m happy to report that this week I’ve finally reached the end of this process—and the beginning of the next phase of actually finding new representation. It’s taken much longer than I anticipated, mostly because of a few rewrites that became necessary in these middle stages of editing. (With big thanks to my wife Nicole for helping me to see how the shape/plot arc of Hyphenates Part I was not all it could be.) My first-choice agency requested full manuscripts almost immediately and is now deliberating. Wish me luck! Coincidentally, I received an out-of-the-blue email from a pretty big-time agent at the end of last week requesting some work. That was pretty cool. Maybe I’ll be sending him something before long, depending on how my first-choice responds.
It’s been somewhat of a weird process the last six months. My first agent left her agency right before Christmas last year, which left me without representation. It was kind of jarring at first, to be let loose like that. I’d probably put too much stock in having an agent, let my sense of self-confidence become too large based upon the fact that, like Don DeLillo, Al Pacinco and A-Rod, I had an agent out there stumping on my behalf. We worked together for over a year on my story collection and, what turned out to be failed, first novel. There were a lot of good things that came from the relationship–such as the idea to switch focus to the historical thread I’m telling with Hyphenates–and I feel much richer for the experience. But it was nice to move on, frankly, to have some free space to work out exactly what I was doing with my books, to dig deeper into myself, and to do so as a writer, rather than as a producer of potential market share. It reminded me of the reasons why I really love doing this, having the chance to indulge daily in the small acts of creation and destruction that eventually tease out a story. These six months have given me the opportunity to refine my projects considerably. And I’m thankful for them. But now, it’s time to get back in the game, to pursue book publication with all I’ve got, and to provide for my family as best as I’m able.
Next week it’s back to work on Part II, which is nearly completed in rough draft form. Hopefully by the end of the summer I’ll have it in some kind of acceptable shape and can move on to actually finishing the book by the end of this year. Not to jinx myself or anything.
Thanks a ton to all my readers who helped work my manuscripts into shape before I sent them off, sometimes on very short-notice. Amber, Bill, Mary Helen, Nabina, Nicole, Travis—you’re the best! And likewise for Jonis, Brent, Gregory, Justin, and Timothy, for giving advice and being advocates on my behalf. All of you are also the best.
-Nicole, Maddie and I were off in Fort Collins last weekend at a wedding. The photos in this post are from the trip.
Maddie really loves weddings.
Dispatch from The Hyphenates of Jackson County
“She was in the same clothes as before, the heavy red dress, torn and dirty by then. Her hair was thin, unpinned and breezy about her face. ‘Is that her?’ Strauss asked. ‘That’s the one you were on about last week?’ Jacob said, ‘Yeah,’ still with his hand on the Pfarrer’s shoulder, their faces close together as they stared at the girl. She was only twenty yards away from them, steadying herself against the trunk of a locust tree, one of the trees Jacob had slept under his first night in Omaha. ‘Her betrothed skipped town,’ Strauss said. It was obvious that the girl lived on the street now, that her family had turned its back on her, or she’d gone crazy and willingly exposed herself to the mutilating fractions of a city.”
Personal Rejection Notes, Requests for More, and Other Nice Versions of No Thanks
The Turk and My Mother by Mary Helen Stefaniak. The first novel of a beloved Creighton professor, this one is highly enjoyable. A kind of folksy post-modern historical novel that seems largely drawn from family history and deals with the tumultuous love lives of our parents and grandparents before we knew them. MHS has a second historical novel coming out this fall, by the way.
We drove up into the mountains in a thunder storm and didn't run over any of the many bicyclers!
Last week on Memorial Day, on the way home from a Schneider family reunion in East Iowa Amish country (Nicole’s side), we stopped at Forest Lawn Cemetery in north Omaha. For a long while now I’ve been meaning to find the grave of Tom Dennison, who plays a major role in my historical novel-in-progress, The Hyphenates of Jackson County.
Tom Dennison with his second wife, Nevajo Truman.
The Forest Lawn website has an awesome database that helped immensely with this. (There’s also a walking tour of the cemetery, for anyone interested in Omaha history.) Of course, when we followed a whim and decided to stop after a day’s driving, we didn’t have any of the necessary information, but it didn’t really matter. We found it anyway, after an hour of walking and deductive reasoning. (Nicole is especially adept at graveyard searches. We usually end up in cemeteries on our vacations and are seldom disappointed. Some of our favorites include the Cimètiere Notre Dame-des-Neiges in Montreal (in a snow storm!), the Key West Cemetery, and many of the solitary headstones we came across while on our fern-thick honeymoon in the Green Mountains of Vermont.)
Over the months anticipating a visit to Dennison’s grave, I had these ideas in my head of a massive tomb, or an iron-doored, stained-glass mausoleum. As the longtime Boss of a wide-reaching political machine, Dennison was massively wealthy, so it stood to reason that he would have erected a memorial to celebrate himself. Forest Lawn, as the final resting place to many of Omaha’s founding fathers and first families, is home to many extravagant mausoleums and statues. I’d even worked up this day-dream where people would go to Dennison’s grave and take a shot of bourbon in some archaic ceremony of patronage. The reality, however, was much different from what I’d expected, as there is merely a large family headstone denoting the Dennison name, and then three smaller markers for Tom, his first wife Ada, and one shared by two sons who, presumably, died in their infancy. It was all very simple. No last words, no statues, no inscriptions.
I’d like to find out more about this, as there seems to be a story here. On the one hand, Dennison typically dressed simply, he came from very humble beginnings and was by most accounts a quiet, private man. So it isn’t out of the realm of possibilities that he would eschew a flamboyant mausoleum. But on the other hand, there were over a hundred cars in his funeral procession, a fact suggesting that his interment was anything but quiet and private. I hypothesized that perhaps the original gravestones were damaged, destroyed or vandalized—and the simple markers were replacements—but I have no evidence to support this. It was strange, too, that none of his children who survived to adulthood were buried there either, which goes against much of what I’ve learned about his private life. Maybe they’d moved away from the area by then. If anyone knows about this, I’d love to hear from you.
Dispatch from The Hyphenates of Jackson County
“Word among those hanging on along the streets, afterwards, was that Tom Dennison had summoned the enforcers to reestablish control after the uprising, and that he’d been slow to give the order because he was vacationing in California and had to be wired with the news. They said that he was on a yacht off the coast of San Diego and they had to wait until he returned to harbor. Johann didn’t believe these stories, he speculated that Dennison was probably in his office downtown, or his mansion west of Benson, that he’d tried to keep things in control but couldn’t. Johann interpreted the delay as yet another breach in the Old Man’s armor—and, after what they’d witnessed from the bathroom window of the Potsdamer, more than a few of their friends agreed with him.”
Personal Rejection Notes, Requests for More, and Other Nice Versions of No Thanks
By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño. If you like the following things, this book is probably not for you: quotation marks, paragraph breaks, chapter breaks, short simple sentences. Otherwise, this is really an engrossing read. Some great sections involving European priests who use falconry as a means to stop pigeons from defecating on cathedrals and on the intersection of artistic patronage and military authoritarianism in Chile.
Netherlandby Joseph O’Neill. This is one of my favorite books, now, and I highly recommend it. The best writing about cricket I’ve ever encountered, which makes this sound like a lesser accomplishment than it really is, since I don’t recall reading about cricket ever before. There was a lot of talk about this being a post-9/11 novel with echoes of The Great Gatsby, but I didn’t really find these elements that central to the story.
There isn’t a whole lot more to add to the writing processes I used and the experiences I had during my residency—as I more or less kept on track with my writing during the final days as I had in the beginning, and ate at the same restaurants—so I’d like to give a short overview of my residency. In all, my approximate volume for the ten and a half days I spent at Kimmel Harding Nelson came in at 24,637 words, which adds up to about 84 pages double-spaced.
There was a blizzard I walked in for an hour one night. Here's what it looked like from my office window.
This is nearly twice the amount of work I expected to finish while in Nebraska City—the safe estimate I gave myself heading in—so it feels pretty awesome to produce this much work. The rough draft of Part II of my novel-in-progress The Hyphenates of Jackson County is nearly finished, which means that I’m over half done with the entire novel itself. In addition, I rewrote five scenes from Part I in first-person point of view in order to tie them more closely to my main character and polished off three blog posts for good measure.
It was a little difficult to work at a high level the final day, with the end in sight. It wasn’t exactly homesickness at this point, but more of a growing excitement to see my family again. So instead of sticking around for the final half day, I ended up driving back on Thursday night and sleeping in my own bed. Good for me, right?
The levies held!
I was off for four days in Denver at the AWP Conference less than two weeks later, so it was nice to half that little extra home time.
As a final word, I’d like to mention that the next deadline for Artist Residencies at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts is September 1, which is for residencies taking place in the January to June, 2011 period. KHN offers great facilities in a quiet setting, a stipend for expenses, and now even cab fare from the Omaha airport. I highly recommend it!
Theodore Wheeler 