I take lots of notes at any gathering I attend. Old habit from my days as a reporter. And, as a writer, I never know when or where I might find ideas for the next story.
This weekend at the Wyoming Writers, Inc., conference in Casper, I heard many good stories. Historical novelist Lucia St. Clair Robson has parlayed her background as a librarian into a career where she researches and writes novels about the Apaches' "Apacheria," Comanches, the U.S.-Mexico War, Episcopalian settlers to The New World, warlords in feudal Japan and many others. She finds many fascinating facts while conducting research. Facts are important but it is the real people she attempts to portray.
I was drawn to her opening session on Saturday because she named it after a James Thurber short story: "The Night the Ghost Got in." Thurber, she said, didn't believe in ghosts. Neither does she, but she lives with the ghosts of people she's met in her research and the characters who have sprung from it. During a school residency a few years ago, Lucia admitted that she lived with ghosts. One student warily asked: "They're not here with you now, are they?"
For writers, the ghosts are always with us. My characters live with me while I'm writing about them. They are with me now. This gives me the distracted, absent-minded professor persona that my wife Chris loves so dearly. They feed my dreams. In fact, I don't dream if I'm not writing. If I'm writing well, the dreams become vivid and strange. They've led to a few nightmares.
Speaking of nightmares, they happen regularly in real life. During a break in yesterday's action, I walked the Casper riverwalk along the North Platte. The water is high and flowing fast. It was a warm, sunny afternoon. On the far bank, some teens were swimming in the pools created by the rising water. Probably not a great idea but it was hot and the water was cool. On my side of the river, a group of volunteers was putting up tents and stringing banners for Sunday's Casper Marathon. Over at Mike Lansing Field, home of the Casper Ghosts, the grounds crew was preparing the field for Saturday night's Legion Baseball games. The Ghosts, the Class A farm team of the Colorado Rockies, don't start their schedule for a couple more weeks.
Lots of people on the path. Families and cyclists and couples with dogs. I passed the ballfield on my left and walked by the park and playground. In the picnic shelter, a woman sat on the floor cavorting with two miniature chihuahuas. The dogs headed for me and the woman got up to follow.
Meanwhile, I looked to my right and saw a man standing on a fallen tree trunk. The man wore a ballcap, T-shirt, baggy shorts and black sneakers. He clutched something in his right hand as he stood staring at the river. At first I thought it was a brown bag. But the way he held it -- it looked like a grip on the stock of a rifle. Not unusual to see people with rifles in Wyoming. But it seemed all wrong on a sunny June Saturday along the Casper Riverwalk.
As I got closer, he looked over and the grip on the object changed. His hand slipped a bit and he caught the object that wasn't a gun but something inside a brown bag. I suddenly understood.
The woman was now closing in on me, she and her two tiny dogs. She had black hair and wore a colorful blouse, leggings and sandals. I said hello and she responded the same. Couldn't tell if she was happy or sad or mad. The dogs negotiated the tall grass, their pointy brown ears and tail tips about the only things visible.
I walked another 10 yards when I heard this from the woman: "Are you going to carry that around all day? Or drink it and fall down?"
Now things were more clear than ever. The man's voice wasn't. He responsed with something that sounded like "gribble, grabble, mumf."
"Then drink it and throw up."
More "gribble, grabble, mumf." The words hit me hard. I realized that I was in the midst of a domestic drama that had no happy ending. I turned. The man was off the log and on the path facing the woman. They seemed calm. No wild gesturing or -- what I feared most -- punching or kicking or even shooting. The dogs carried on in their hyper way, not paying attention to either human.
I walked on. Could not keep those people out of my mind as I walked until the path was blocked by the rising river and I turned around. The couple wasn't there when I passed their confrontation site. I wondered if they had driven away and if they had, was the drunken man at the wheel? Of had he actually puked or maybe even fallen down in the parking lot.
The two people and their dogs are now part of the crowd of ghosts swirling in my imagination. I may use this scene in a story or I may not. I may use the dialog in a story but different characters. I may use the scene in a new place or time. Time will tell.
Ghosts. I may not believe in them. They are real, just the same.
Showing posts with label fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fiction. Show all posts
Support your local libraries -- and read "Catch-22"
"From "Brokeback Mountain" to "Beyond Brokeback" -- the long life of a short story
On Friday, as I drove the pass back to Cheyenne, I thought about the impact and mystery of the arts. I had just seen a staged reading of “Beyond Brokeback” at the Shepard Symposium for Social Justice at UW. “Beyond Brokeback” is another chapter in the story of “Brokeback Mountain,” a short story written by Wyoming writer Annie Proulx back in the last century. She wrote it in the mid-1990s and it made its debut in the The New Yorker magazine in 1997. It was in Proulx’s 1999 collection Close Range: Wyoming Stories. The first edition of the book featured illustrations by renowned Western artist William Matthews. A signed copy is worth a lot, I’m told by eBay.
That, as we say in the short story writing business, is that. The New Yorker copies get recycled and books are read and put up on the home library shelf. Its bookstore shelf life, especially in the dark ages of the 1990s, was probably a couple of months. The book was used in the Wyoming Humanities Council “Reading Wyoming” series. One of the stories, “Pair a Spurs,” was excerpted in Deep West: A Literary Tour of Wyoming by the Wyoming Center for the Book. I co-edited the book with Wyoming Poet Laureate David Romtvedt and then-director of the Center for the Book, Linn Rounds.
So the stories already had more visibility than is usual for the genre. Annie Proulx is a Pulitzer Prize winner, after all, for the The Shipping News, set in Newfoundland but written in Wyoming. The critics liked it, yet many Wyomingites did not. The stories featured (in no particular order) a crazy mother who tossed her infant into a creek, a half-skinned steer, wanton hussies, a smattering of drunks, a talking tractor, crazy old coots and violence a-plenty. I, for one, liked the talking tractor in “The Bunchgrass Edge of the World.” And I was proud of myself for tracking down and reading the Icelandic Saga that was the basis for “The Half-Skinned Steer.”
I read some – but not all – of the stories in Close Range. I missed “Brokeback Mountain.” It wasn’t the subject matter of two young cowboys having a homosexual relationship. I just didn’t get around to it until I listened to the entire audiobook during a long drive across the state. The tale ended as I drove a secondary road in Fremont County. I pulled over to take a deep breath so that I wouldn’t cry on company time. The scene with the shirts in the closet was one of the most powerful endings of any American story. I sat there on the side of the road, contemplating this very touching love story between two men of the West.
As I mentioned, Close Range was not beloved here in The Equality State. The former state parks director, a Wyoming native and voracious reader, said that he liked the stories but wished that they had been written about Nebraska. During a drive to Cody with a colleague, I excitedly plugged in the Close Range audiobook. We listened to the first two stories. After the second concluded, my colleague asked if we could listen to something else. “The stories are depressing,” she said. We listened to an oldies station the rest of the way.
I’ve spoken with Annie Proulx several times. At an art museum opening in Casper, she told me that she was dismayed that people thought her stories about Wyoming cowboys and barmaids and oil patch workers were inaccurate and hard to believe. Proulx, a dogged researcher, said that the stories were based on real incidents dug from the archives. She changed the names and added details and gave it her own writerly touch. The author was already working on another collection of Wyoming stories – she did three in all.
We skip ahead to 2005. “Brokeback Mountain,” the film by Ang Lee starring Jake Gyllenhaal and the ill-fated Heath Ledger, opened with much fanfare. Theatres in some small towns refused to show the film. There was even a question whether it would be screened anywhere in Wyoming (it was). The film made a lot of money and gets some Oscar nominations. At the Oscar ceremony in 2006, novelist Larry McMurtry and screenwriter Diana Ossana won the award for best adapted screenplay from Proulx’s story.
Meanwhile, thousands of people were leaving comments on the Ultimate Brokeback Forum web site. Their comments were angry, sad, sweet and funny. They arrived from all over the world and from all kinds of people young and old, gay and straight, rural and urban. Site founder Dave Cullen says that the site recorded 500,000 posts the first year. Another 50,000 to 100,000 lurkers came by to see what was going on.
A lot, as it turned out.
Cullen culled the commentary and poetry and song lyrics and came up with enough intriguing narrative to fill a book, Beyond Brokeback: Impact of a Film. On December 11, 2010, the fifth anniversary of the movie’s release, Gregory Hinton debuted his adaptation of “Beyond Brokeback” at the Autry Museum in L.A. The museum is named after its benefactor, cowboy crooner Gene Autry who died one of the richest men in America. The show was part of the museum’s “Out West” series, a clever bit of word play.
The Autry event comes with its own connection to Wyoming (funny how they keep on coming up). Gregory Hinton grew up in Cody where his father was editor of the newspaper. He acknowledges the sad fact that many LGBT kids in rural places depart rather than stay, believing (for many good reasons) that there is no place for them. They flee to cities where being gay is not an excuse for revulsion or name-calling or worse. As one commentator said on the Ultimate Brokeback Forum, there are three items from the film that every gay young man knows: the closet, a bloody shirt, and a tire iron.
Hinton was invited to present “Beyond Brokeback” at the Shepard Symposium. This symposium is named for Matthew Shepard, the young gay man from Casper who was severely beaten and left for dead on an October night in Laramie. The theme of this year’s Shepard Symposium was “CREATE: Activism Toward Social Justice.”
Friday’s “Beyond Brokeback” staged reading featured these talented people: James Bowyer, Lee Hodgson, John J. O’Hagan, Peter Parolin, Hannah Peterson, Katie Stearns and Katrina Zook. Bowyer also played the piano and sang along with Zook. Shawn Kirchner wrote the original songs. The reading was directed by O’Hagan and produced by Hinton and O’Hagan. It’s important to name the names. Not only did they do a terrific job on stage, they breathed life into people they’d never met. We heard stories from a farmer who’d just tended to his 95 cows, a 57-year-old divorced woman who was making some big changes, and a gay Jackson, Wyo., resident who loved his natural surroundings but was mystified by the prejudice he received from humans. A “senior division” gay man regretted his lonely, anonymous suburban life – yet still was willing to give love another try. A married woman took her tough-guy husband to the movie and was shocked when he admitted crying at the sad ending. “He’s going to get lucky tonight,” she quipped.
These were the voices of real people shaped by the art of a writer and told by actors and teachers and singers. They transformed the work. And it lives on.
What can be made of this long history of this short story turned script turned movie turned web site turned book turned script turned stage performance? It’s miraculous how one creative work can beget so many other creative works. The movie received most of the attention. But the saga now is entering another phase.
As mentioned earlier, Greg Hinton knows what it’s like to grow up different in the rural West. His formative years go back a few decades. But when you survey the state now, you realize it hasn’t gotten much better. Witness the foofaraw over the “Erase the Hate” banner removed from the Wheatland schools last year. Witness the huge outpouring of anti-gay sentiment during Wyoming’s recent legislative session. Rural school continue to reject the state’s anti-bullying program because school boards, stacked with fundamentalists, fear that anti-bullying has an agenda to protect LGBT youth. It does, of course. No bullying means no bullying – period. No bullying of gays or lesbians or ethnic minorities (only 8 percent of the state’s population and less in rural areas) or those with physical or mental or psychological disabilities. All that these small-town school boards see is what they hear in their tight-knit circles and close-minded churches and (of course) Fox “News.” It’s no surprise that these rural areas send some of the most close-minded people to the state legislature.
Greg Hinton wants to take “Beyond Brokeback” to small towns and rural communities around the state that shaped him. His goal is to put scripts in the hands of teachers and ranchers and home-school moms and have them read the commentary from “Beyond Brokeback.” It would be entertaining and educational. It may open up a few minds. Audience members might even see themselves in there somewhere. As Hinton said when he introduced the staged reading on Friday:
"I was born on the Fort Peck Reservation in Montana, grew up in Cody, and went to school in Boulder, Colo. I experienced bias as a rural-born Western man.”
But he felt forced to leave the places that he loved. “But not everybody is leaving anymore. That’s what today is all about.”
I am a straight man (“senior division”) who was born in the West, grew up in the South, and returned to the West because I love it. I didn’t experience the same kind of bias that LGBT youth did in the West or the South. I saw it, though, and now know many who experienced it then -- and are experiencing it now. LGBT youth need to hear the voices of people like them. They are not alone. And it gets better.
If you’re interested in hearing more about Greg Hinton’s project, or you have an interest in bringing a staged reading to your community, send me a comment here or look me up on Facebook.
The work is in the poem, the poem is in the work
This week's news on the international front has been about Bahrainis and Libyans and Yemenis and Iranians protesting their home-grown despots. News on the home front has focused on the world of work. The Wyoming Legislature refused to take federal money for unemployment benefits. Legislators also tried to take away teachers' collective bargaining rights. Rich Republicans in Congress want to cut budgets and the jobs that go with them. Wisconsin teachers and city snowplow drivers and fire fighters went on strike and staged a huge protest at the state capitol. They were outraged that their multi-millionaire governor wanted to eliminate their union rights and their jobs with it.
We're in the middle of a class war. The rich want to turn us into low-paid drones. Some of us are there already, if we have a job.
I've had so many jobs in my 60 years. I had paper routes in grades 6-8. In high school, I was a busboy and dishwasher and grocery store bagboy. In college, I had these jobs: fast-food clerk and cook, mower of lawns, construction laborer, assembly-line worker building roof trusses, hospital orderly, cafeteria cashier, photographer's assistant, free-lance writer and a few other short-term gigs. After college, I was a bookstore clerk, reporter for a Florida construction trade journal, warehouse order-puller, editor of a journal for a Denver real estate developer, editor of a weekly arts and entertainment weekly, sports reporter, free-lance writer, telephone solicitor, corporate publications editor, tutor, junior high paper grader, college composition teacher and editor of a literary magazine. In 1991, I went to work for the State of Wyoming and, for two years in the mid-1990s, worked for the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, D.C. A public employee for 20 years.
I know what work is. I'm a Democrat and a union member in a state with a shortage of each. I deeply resent the demonizing of public employees by Republicans. It must stop. If not, who will do the work?
This week, I'm featuring writing about work. Some will be mine, some will come from the anthology "Working Words: Punching the Clock and Kicking Out the Jams," edited by M.L. Liebler. M.L. is coming to Cheyenne this time next week for a performance, workshop and judging of the Wyoming Poetry Out Loud competition, which is co-sponsored by my employer, the Wyoming Arts Council. One of my short stories is in the "Working Words" anthology. You can buy the book and read that and other fiction and essays and poetry about the world of work. I'm glad to be in the book. My payment for my submission was two free copies. This is typical for writers. We tend to be lousy capitalists. But I am very pleased to be included with M.L. and Philip Levine and Wanda Coleman and the late Walt Whitman and the very-much-with-us Eminem.
Here's an excerpt from a poem in the anthology. It's entitled "Work Work Work" and written by the late Trinidad Sanchez, Jr. (1943-2006), who grew up in Pontiac, Mich., and became a Jesuit brother who worked with juvenile offenders and prison inmates in Detroit. The excerpt:
Work, work, work, not easy to define
but easy to delineate
by those standing in line
to punch a clock
to buy a sandwich off the truck
to catch a bus / to catch a bus
to cash a check...
easy to delineate
by those standing in long lines of unemployed, underemployed and food
stamp lines
Detroit comes to Cheyenne Feb. 26
 |
| M.L. Liebler and Peter Lewis |
Detroit is a symbol of Americans at work. When all the auto companies were going full bore after World War II, Detroit was king. And then came the rise of Japanese automakers and knuckleheaded decisions by The Big Three and gubment. Plants were closed, jobs were sent overseas and Michigan kids had to forget about following in Dad's footsteps as a well-paid union worker with a future.
We loved that Detroit. It was the city that made the muscle cars of the sixties -- and provided all the hot machines that I watched racing around Daytona International Speedway. We loved those cars.
Detroit has a lively literary scene. One of its leaders is performance poet M.L. Liebler. He edited a recent book, "Working Words: Punching the Clock and Kicking Out the Jams," The "kicking out the jams" reference in the subtitle pays homage to the classic rock song by Detroit's MC5, "Kick Out the Jams." The book includes poetry and prose about the lives of working people, particularly those who labored in the Industrial Belt's factories. One of my rural West stories made the cut, "The Problem with Mrs. P." I had the pleasure of reading that piece in Detroit a few years ago. The story is set in Cheyenne but focuses on the plight of working people. By the way, one of Eminem's creations is also in the book. You may remember "Lose Yourself" from the movie "8 Mile." It's not about a Chrysler.
Look, if you had one shot or one opportunityOther contributors to the anthology, winner of a 2010 Michigan Book Award, include Phil Levine, who writes poetry about his own years on the assembly line; Ed Sanders, one-time member of the Fugs and author of the best book about the Manson Family murders; L.A. poet and performer Wanda Coleman; Appalachian-born writer and nurse Jeanne Bryner of Ohio; and Detroit writer Lolita Hernandez, who worked for 21 years at the Cadillac plant.
To seize everything you ever wanted -- one moment
Would you capture it or just let it slip?
On Sunday, Feb. 27, Peter and M.L. will conduct a free public workshop at the Laramie County Public Library from 2-4 p.m.
On Monday, Feb. 28, M.L. will serve as one of three judges for the 2011 Wyoming Poetry Out Loud competition. The competition begins at 7 p.m. at the Atlas Theatre. Peter will perform a short performance during intermission. This event is free and open to the public.
These events are all sponsored by the Wyoming Arts Council, the Poetry Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Here is some bio info on M.L. and Peter:
One of our judges for the Poetry Out Loud event will be M.L. Liebler, a mover and shaker in the Detroit poetry scene. He has written several books of poetry including the 2001 Finalist for The Paterson Poetry Prize and was winner of The 2001 Wayne State University Board of Governors’ Award. He has read and worked with Ed Sanders, Diane di Prima, Michael McClure, Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary & William Burroughs.
In addition, Liebler has recorded his poetry with such musical legends as Al Kooper, Country Joe McDonald, Jorma Kaukonen, Mike Watt, The Magic Poetry Band and many others. Liebler also edited the recently released anthology, "Working Words," from Coffee House Press.
M.L. has been to Wyoming before, serving as one of the judges for the Wyoming Arts Council's FY 2002 creative writing fellowships and as a presenter at one of the last ARTSPEAK conferences, held in Jackson in the fall of 2001. As director of the Detroit YMCA Writer's Voice, he came to Cheyenne in 2002-2003 at the request of the YMCA to conduct poetry and music presentations and workshops with Woodstock legend Country Joe MacDonald.
Peter Lewis is a founding member of the 1960s band Moby Grape. Their debut album was released in 1967, and it is still to this day one of the most revered rock albums of all times according to Rolling Stone magazine and other cultural critics. The band's energetic and hyper-exciting combination of folk, blues, and country was a unique sound to rock & roll. It was a new kind of American roots music but the band's career never took off the way it should have, due to personal tragedies. It took Peter Lewis a long time to shake off the troubled legacy of his band and begin to make his mark again with a stellar singer/songwriting recording career. Don’t miss out on the chance to see this living legend perform.
M.L. and Peter perform together. These two artists take their audience on a historical, cultural & literary journey from poetry to blues, folk and rock up to original contemporary compositions of both poetry and music. Together they blend words & music with beautiful harmonies, memories and the art of spoken word.
FMI and tix at Wyoming Arts Council and 307-777-7742.
Staged reading and music part of Autry's fifth anniversary screening of "Brokeback Mountain"
Cross-posted from the wyomingarts blog:
The Autry in L.A. describes itself as "California’s only museum and cultural center dedicated to the history, art, and stories of the American West. Located in Griffith Park, the Autry features special exhibitions, lively programs, and hands-on activities for kids." While the Autry isn't exactly commuting distance from Wyoming, it is interesting to note that one-time Wyoming resident Annie Proulx wrote the story that started it all. "Brokeback Mountain" was in her collection Close Range: Wyoming Stories, with color illustrations (in the hardcover first edition) by noted Denver artist William Matthews. Annie also shared the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for the film, now celebrating the fifth anniversary of its release. According to Variety mag, New York's City Opera had plans for a "Brokeback Mountain" opera until the 2008 economic collapse -- and the departure of its artistic director -- caused it to shelve the project.
Montana and Wyoming fiction writers give freaks a pass
“Giving freaks a pass is the oldest tradition in Montana. And you, my friend, are a blue-ribbon, bull-goose freak.”
That’s a line from Thomas McGuane’s new novel, “Driving on the Rim,” Maile Meloy reviewed the novel (mostly favorably) and referred to those lines as her favorites. I like them too.
I haven’t read a McGuane novel since “92 in the Shade.” And that was decades ago. More recently I’ve read McGuane’s essay collection, “A Sporting Chance.” Practically everything I know about cutting horses I know from this fine book. McGuane raises and trains cutting horses in Montana. As a youth, I was chronically allergic to horse hair and hay and weeds and almost everything else you can find on a ranch. Fortunately, I was a city boy and not a farmer’s son out on the prairie.
I have since been on horseback five or six times without collapsing with an asthma attack. But my sensibilities are totally non-horse and horses know it.
Maybe that’s why I’m so taken with McGuane’s facility with horses. Horses and language. As Meloy points out in the NYT review, McGuane’s novels are a little baggy while his essays are succinct works of art. She also points out some factual inconsistencies regarding some of the book’s characters.
But she’s willing to give McGuane a pass on this. Just as the attorney in the book in willing to give a Montana-style pass to the main character. Meloy gives McGuane a pass because he’s such a damn fine writer and he’s written a good book.
I sometimes get a bit suspicious when a fictional character’s freakishness is called out. It’s almost as if the author, who’s spent thousands of words portraying his character’s quirkiness, must now actually say the word “freak!” Just in case you missed all the clues.
But there’s something a bit deeper here. Have the quirky characters of the Rocky Mountain West become a bit of a stereotype? Quirky people live here, denizens of the Great Wide Open. They often have fled the more settled places of the East and South and Coastal West. They are tough individualists drawn to the live-and-let-live Code of the West. It’s not a code, exactly, more like guidelines. But you know what I mean.
Used to be all the freaky characters came from the minds of writers of the South – William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Larry Brown, Kaye Gibbons, Barry Hannah, Harry Crews, etc. Along came Annie Proulx, Lee K. Abbott, John Nichols, Rick DeMaranis, Ron Carlson, Alyson Hagy, etc. These writers of the West wrote great stories and novels about freakish people driven by a search for solitude or personal freedom or some undefined crucial core value. Southern characters, on he other hand, were driven more by ghosts of the so-called glorious past and the constraints of their old-time religion.
I love freaky characters. I often try to invent some for my stories. But just because you live in a freakish place, such as Montana or Wyoming, that doesn’t mean you’re off the hook when it comes to creating believable characters.
Name the freakiest place you know. If you’re a button-down Midwesterner, Boulder, Colorado’s Pearl Street Mall might test your sensibilities. If you’re a hipster from Boulder, a trip to Sun City, Ariz., might cause you to come unglued.
Wyoming is pretty freaky, I must admit. Bill Sniffin’s Sunday newspaper column was devoted to the antics of the former Miss Wyoming-World, Joyce McKinney. McKinney is the focus of Errol Morris’s latest documentary, “Tabloid.” In 1977 in London, she kidnapped a former boyfriend, a young LDS missionary, and forced him to have sex for three days. The British tabloids had a field day with this woman who committed rape on a man. That’s the focus of Morris’s film.
Sniffin of Lander also recalled that McKinney surfaced a few years in Tennessee, paying a man to burglarize a house “to pay for an artificial leg for a three-legged horse.”
As Playlist says about Morris’s story: “Intoxicatingly entertaining and outrageously wild, Hollywood’s top writers could never have dreamed this up.”
Hollywood writers? No. But Mountain West writers – of course.
That’s a line from Thomas McGuane’s new novel, “Driving on the Rim,” Maile Meloy reviewed the novel (mostly favorably) and referred to those lines as her favorites. I like them too.
I haven’t read a McGuane novel since “92 in the Shade.” And that was decades ago. More recently I’ve read McGuane’s essay collection, “A Sporting Chance.” Practically everything I know about cutting horses I know from this fine book. McGuane raises and trains cutting horses in Montana. As a youth, I was chronically allergic to horse hair and hay and weeds and almost everything else you can find on a ranch. Fortunately, I was a city boy and not a farmer’s son out on the prairie.
I have since been on horseback five or six times without collapsing with an asthma attack. But my sensibilities are totally non-horse and horses know it.
Maybe that’s why I’m so taken with McGuane’s facility with horses. Horses and language. As Meloy points out in the NYT review, McGuane’s novels are a little baggy while his essays are succinct works of art. She also points out some factual inconsistencies regarding some of the book’s characters.
But she’s willing to give McGuane a pass on this. Just as the attorney in the book in willing to give a Montana-style pass to the main character. Meloy gives McGuane a pass because he’s such a damn fine writer and he’s written a good book.
I sometimes get a bit suspicious when a fictional character’s freakishness is called out. It’s almost as if the author, who’s spent thousands of words portraying his character’s quirkiness, must now actually say the word “freak!” Just in case you missed all the clues.
But there’s something a bit deeper here. Have the quirky characters of the Rocky Mountain West become a bit of a stereotype? Quirky people live here, denizens of the Great Wide Open. They often have fled the more settled places of the East and South and Coastal West. They are tough individualists drawn to the live-and-let-live Code of the West. It’s not a code, exactly, more like guidelines. But you know what I mean.
Used to be all the freaky characters came from the minds of writers of the South – William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Larry Brown, Kaye Gibbons, Barry Hannah, Harry Crews, etc. Along came Annie Proulx, Lee K. Abbott, John Nichols, Rick DeMaranis, Ron Carlson, Alyson Hagy, etc. These writers of the West wrote great stories and novels about freakish people driven by a search for solitude or personal freedom or some undefined crucial core value. Southern characters, on he other hand, were driven more by ghosts of the so-called glorious past and the constraints of their old-time religion.
I love freaky characters. I often try to invent some for my stories. But just because you live in a freakish place, such as Montana or Wyoming, that doesn’t mean you’re off the hook when it comes to creating believable characters.
Name the freakiest place you know. If you’re a button-down Midwesterner, Boulder, Colorado’s Pearl Street Mall might test your sensibilities. If you’re a hipster from Boulder, a trip to Sun City, Ariz., might cause you to come unglued.
Wyoming is pretty freaky, I must admit. Bill Sniffin’s Sunday newspaper column was devoted to the antics of the former Miss Wyoming-World, Joyce McKinney. McKinney is the focus of Errol Morris’s latest documentary, “Tabloid.” In 1977 in London, she kidnapped a former boyfriend, a young LDS missionary, and forced him to have sex for three days. The British tabloids had a field day with this woman who committed rape on a man. That’s the focus of Morris’s film.
Sniffin of Lander also recalled that McKinney surfaced a few years in Tennessee, paying a man to burglarize a house “to pay for an artificial leg for a three-legged horse.”
As Playlist says about Morris’s story: “Intoxicatingly entertaining and outrageously wild, Hollywood’s top writers could never have dreamed this up.”
Hollywood writers? No. But Mountain West writers – of course.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
