After an execrable showing — one entry these past two months — we’re getting our sea legs once again. The title above refers to a question I was asked just yesterday by a young reader: “ . . . themes in one or more of your adventure stories appear reminiscent of scenic and/or structural elements in the Star Wars films; are you an appreciator?”

I responded that, yes, I am, though I can profess familiarity with only the best of the films, by which I mean the first three, beginning in 1977, when I was twenty-one, with “Episode IV: A New Hope.” I must have seen that movie, oh, three or four times while it was still in the theaters. From the parking lot afterwards, my Plymouth dipped on its squishy tires not unlike the Millennian Falcon, at least until the first traffic light. But the title resonates with any old number of things we envision for the coming year; thus, a new hope on many fronts.

I read a nifty bit in Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature that I want to share. It’s in his introduction to discussion of Bleak House, which comes in the book as it must have come in his lecture sequence, just after his analysis of Mansfield Park, about whose author he has just admitted, “I am sure that some readers have a better ear for Miss Austen than I have.” He is much more in his element with Dickens. “In our dealings with Jane Austen we had to make a certain effort in order to join the ladies in the drawing room. In the case of Dickens we remain at table with our tawny port.”

This is not the quote I want to share, but it’s probably good to pause here and reflect for a moment on the writer’s approach to literature, because it is very much summed up in the structural imagery he gives us. There is a physical delight, a geographical reality to the joy, that great literature gives us. There is the comfort of our haunches remaining in the chairs about the table where Mr. Dickens sits, telling us his story. Nabokov famously dismissed “great ideas” from his analysis of great novels. Ideas come and go, are timebound, anachronistic, ephemeral, inelegantly voiced by even the best artist. What remains when you take the nonsense away is the artistry of structure, the structure of artistry. And that is a physiological truth, as he explains in the bit I do want to share.

“All we have to do when reading Bleak House is to relax and let our spines take over. Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight is between the shoulder blades. That little shiver behind is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained when evolving pure art and pure science. Let us worship the spine and its tingle. Let us be proud of our being vertebrates, for we are vertebrates tipped at the head with a divine flame. The brain only continues the spine: the wick really goes through the whole length of the candle. If we are not capable of enjoying that shiver, if we cannot enjoy literature, then let us give up the whole thing and concentrate on our comics, our videos, our books-of-the-week. But I think Dickens will prove stronger.”

We often approach Nabokov, and certainly we do as students when we first are introduced to him, as cryptographers, bloodlessly connecting the dots of his plots and characters in order to “understand” the text. This was his game, to craft a surface shiny and exotic, a well-built box, which all too often as students we might decide was all there was to be discovered. He was a master at that. And may have been as cold a man himself as a box would be, though a box resounding with great humor.

But here, in his appreciation of writers’ masterworks, he folds himself into a burnished chair at the old table. He listens, objects, stares, laughs, and passes the port, hour upon hour, as his spine tingles with every imperishable line. For myself, when I read something extraordinary, a line that, say, knocks the top of my head off, the physical sense is foremost — chills, a kind of breathlessness, a desire to pace around, sit, read it again, and, maybe above all, to collar someone and read the whole thing out to him. With the helpless exclamation: “Do you see?”

Let’s not forget, while we’re at it, to send  a rousing birthday cheer to Mr. Dickens, 200 and never stronger.

This is the week that Fall 2011 evaluations of my MFA students’ work are due, and three of the four have been written and dispatched. It’s also the week teachers receive manuscripts to be workshopped at the residency that kicks off the Spring 2012 semester. Breathe out, breathe in. The “dip” between semesters, after one ends and before the next begins, has amounted to little more than an hour or two, and that’s fine. You wouldn’t want too much time to lapse between semesters, students, and teaching, even given all the other stuff that’s got to be attended to.

But this hour of peace — in the season of peace — does prompt me to look at the end of my first year of teaching and question and wonder.

Do I like teaching? I love teaching. There’s so much that satisfies. . . .

The ongoing task of gathering what I’ve learned — and what I feel — about language and writing. I find it makes me accountable to my own knowledge of craft. It’s a constant test and question of myself.

There’s the reading of so many texts, a focused, deeper reading than I may have attended to before, all in the service of helping to shape craft knowledge into a form deliverable to someone else.

There’s that flutter in the chest when I come across something really fine in a student’s work; you know what it is: it makes you want to jump up and walk around the room before sitting down to read more

No small part of teaching is the talk that surrounds and extends and argues it.

There’s the talk about work as if work is the only thing there is.

Am I good at teaching? Ffft! Not yet. I feel like a diviner in a room of scientists. Good writing too often seems to me to be unexplainable, a fact I notice when I try to explain it. It’s like describing air. The best teaching that I can do is probably to simply point at someone’s story and say, “There. Do you see it?”

In a seminar I gave last semester there was the embarrassing moment when I read a piece of Agee to the class and my commentary was a stifled choke. What good is that to a student? Still, I’m likely to do the same thing this time. I’m a rube in the city of learning but I do love it, and I can’t wait for it all to start up.

Why can’t I ever read one book at a time? Start, read, finish, and put away? Is it like this for everyone? On my desk are at some thirty-five new books that I am at least two chapters in to, some far more, but I do not seem to want to finish any of them. Somehow, knowing that they are undone keeps them alive and still in the process of deep communion. Once the cover is closed and all the words have been read, there is a death.

I’m reminded that John Irving’s intense passion for Dickens includes an unread book. I don’t know if it’s still true, but I recall him saying that he’s saving Our Mutual Friend, the last completed novel, until his deathbed. Irving wants Dickens to ever be an ongoing pleasure, one that’s never quite finished, a hunger never completely satisfied.

I’ve recently gotten the new Van Gogh: The Life, along with the Penguin edition of his letters. After recently visiting the house north of Paris where he died, I couldn’t resist the gargantuan and acclaimed study. And, well, his letters are among his prized leavings.

I collect short books, but they are apparently no easier to finish. Train Dreams by Denis Johnson and Brooklyn Is by James Agee, both beautiful little hardcover volumes of 116 and 50 pages, respectively, have been sampled, more than sampled, yet I know that when I finish them and so would be free to remove them from the pile of the “living” to a shelf behind me, a loss will inhabit the desk. So I refuse to do it, and have learned to read books paragraph by paragraph while the piles get taller.

As if I needed to add anything else to a work table straining under the weight, I picked up at a local bookshop on a recent trip to Ohio, Philip Roth’s Nemesis, his novel about a fictitious polio epidemic in Newark in the summer of 1944. I remember polio victims. There are was a girl in my class in Cleveland when I was growing up a decade after Roth’s story. He is a writer I find extremely easy to read. His narratives flow like rivers, and you find yourself twenty, thirty, sixty pages in before you come up for air. This book I will probably finish, just because he rarely lets you do otherwise.

Recently — why him? why now? — I’ve begun to read Malamud again after decades. His biography by Philp Davis, an excellent work that did something, but apparently not enough, to raise the novelist to his former stature, is riveting and supremely intelligent. Now I find that I can’t help but dredge out the novels and stories I read so long ago. They are dense. No hope to skim them away. They’re now taking up yet more real estate on my desk.

The Civil War, anything on the Civil War! The Great Rebellion, the War Between the States, was far more my war than Korea, under which I was born; I was eight at its centennial, and my brother and I played Civil War in our backyard, in the woods across the road, in our shared bedroom, in our minds. And to truly know the war one must know what led to it, so now . . . The Impending Crisis: America Before the Civil War 1848-1861 has taken its place in the stack — right between Hemingway’s Boat and Thomas W. Nason: New England Virtues Aged in Wood, a monograph on the woodcut artist by Charles Price, published by the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, Ct, a place I was happy to visit a couple of weeks ago.

And it never ends. Which I guess is how I prefer it.

Well.

It was the word under my high school yearbook picture. Well. Because apparently that’s what people remembered me saying a lot. So much so, in fact, that “well” must have become universally recognized as my calling card. I objected to a yearbook writer by saying, “Well, how could you write that? Isn’t there something else about me? Well, isn’t there?”

The editor said, “Not now, Bobby.”

I’m at the tail end of a barnstorming tour of Ohio, having taken in Cleveland, Hudson, Delaware, and Wooster, zigzagging across the state, visiting as many as three cities a day. Gosh, if I only played baseball in 1936. The ostensible purpose of my “tour,” as opposed to a one- or two-day school visit, was to talk about the new book, the one that revolves around a family living in Cleveland. In practice, however, the book didn’t get all that much play because the presentations I did were attended by mostly younger children. I snuck in as much as I could say about it before launching into a survey of my more popular younger writing.

Uh . . . what else? There is now a classroom guide to the book, written by Cliff Wohl. Soon, I’ll be back home, where it looks like we’ll be taking in a second dog as soon as Monday. The book has my initials blind-stamped on the hardcover, the first time that has ever happened. You can’t help but run your thumb over the stamping. I am as proud of that as of anything. Our old, ailing apple tree finally went down in the recent snowstorm. Greg Call painted a lovely cover; someone thought they recognized the bus station, but it’s not a bus station in Ohio, it’s in Atlanta. It’s clear here in Wooster and warm, a day before the outstanding Buckeye Book Fair that takes place all day tomorrow. Hudson Library and Historical Society, where I was last night, has, not that I was able to view it on this trip, an outstanding collection of material relating to John Brown; Brown lived in Hudson from the time he was five to his sixteenth year, when he moved to Massachusetts, then Connecticut, to study for the ministry. I’m deeply happy that I wrote the story and on Wednesday happened to meet a middle school student in Delaware, who presented a school report on it. Houses on either side of my home in Cleveland are empty blank little boxes.

From November 1 – 5, I will be in Ohio (my fair native state), reading and signing LUNCH-BOX DREAM, which appeared from Farrar Straus Giroux this summer. Naturally, I’ll also be talking about other books, but being the setting for the new novel, Ohio has been in my plans for quite a while. I’m happy to be able to visit. Here are the dates:

Tuesday, November 1
Seton Catholic School (Hudson, Ohio), afternoon;
The Hudson Public Library (Hudson), pm.
Books provided at both events by The Learned Owl Book Shop.

Wednesday, November 2
Parkview Elementary School (Wooster), am;
Fundamentals Bookstore (Delaware), 4:30-6pm.

Thursday, November 3
Cleveland Public Library, 10:30 am;
Lincoln Way Elementary (Wooster), 3:30 pm.

Friday, November 4
Wooster Public Library, 10:30 am:

Saturday, November 5
Buckeye Book Fair (Wooster), all day.

The school appearances are usually closed affairs, but the library visits in Cleveland, Hudson, and Wooster are open to the public, as is, of course, the Buckeye Book Fair so . . . I would love to meet  you if you’re able to visit!

Language is not only the atomic level of substance we use to write — the bricks of the building, as it were — but the hugeness of the building and the reason why the building is there in the first place.

There are some writers who believe that novels are NOTHING BUT language, and it’s frankly hard to argue with them. Creating, or pretending to create life with words is a pretty cheeky undertaking; it’s perfectly comprehensible to believe that a novel is really nothing more, or less, than a structure built of words. It’s no more real, let’s say, than a piece of sheet music.

But let’s set that consideration aside for now and look at a couple aspects of how language is used in fiction

Richard Yates begins REVOLUTIONARY ROAD this way:

The final dying sounds of their dress rehearsal left the Laurel Players with nothing to do but stand there, silent and helpless, blinking out over the footlights of an empty auditorium. They hardly dared to breathe as the short, solemn figure of their director emerged from the naked seats to join them on stage, as he pulled a stepladder raspingly from the wings and climbed halfway up its rungs to turn and tell them, with several clearings of his throat, that they were a damned talented group of people and a wonderful group of people to work with.

I’ll pause here. This paragraph, if you read it aloud, uses perfectly familiar, everyday language, with the exception of the single word “raspingly,” and you understand every word of it. It’s visible, palpable, this late-night scene on the stage. You see the group of players, exhausted, you see the director dragging the ladder out from off stage, you watch him climb — halfway — and you “hear” his remarks to the players.

What else? It’s a melancholy scene, isn’t it. “The final dying sounds . . . ” “silent and helpless” . . . “climbed [only] halfway up” “several clearings of his throat” . . . and so forth. All the vocabulary works toward this end, which prefigures the mood of the novel. People caught silent and helpless, blinking before the footlights, a little man telling them what? Nothing all that great.

The director’s clumsy repetition of “group of people” in the last sentence, which you might easily miss because Yates has been using plain language so far, tells us something, doesn’t it? It tells us that the director, the mind behind the production, the great mind behind the Laurel Players’ upcoming performance isn’t great with language. He uses the same phrase twice because he can’t think of another way to say it. This is damning. The one — the only — person the players look to is a short solemn man with a limited ability to speak and lead. Let’s look at the next paragraphs.

“It hasn’t been an easy job,” he said, his glasses glinting soberly around the stage. “We’ve had a lot of problems here, and quite frankly I’d more or less resigned myself not to expect too much. Well, listen. Maybe this sounds corny, but something happened up here tonight. Sitting out there tonight I suddenly knew, deep down, that you were all putting your hearts into your work for the first time.” He let the fingers of one hand splay out across the pocket of his shirt to show what a simple, physical thing the heart was; then he made the same hand into a fist, which he shook slowly and wordlessly in a long dramatic pause, closing one eye and allowing his moist lower lip to curl out in a grimace of triumph and pride. “Do that again tomorrow night,” he said, “and we’ll have one hell of a show.”

They could have wept with relief. Instead, trembling, they cheered and laughed and shook hands and kissed one another, and somebody went out for a case of beer and they all sang songs around the auditorium piano until the time came to agree, unanimously, that they’d better knock it off and get a good night’s sleep.

And what more happens here with language? The director is depicted as a sober, sentimental little man, honorable, but self-serious and limited. He does the language thing again, doesn’t he? “Something happened up here tonight. Sitting out there tonight . . . ” And the forming from splayed fingers of a little fist and shaking it wordlessly with one eye closed — this is almost laughably silly. In this director, we are getting a very quick, but very fresh description of a small-town artist. “A grimace of triumph and pride,” indeed. It’s a beautifully damning characterization, but one that sets the tone for the story to come, and one that in fact, prefigures the false triumph and pride of its two main characters, one of whom is one of the Laurel Players.

Finally, in that last paragraph, take a look at what happens. After two opening paragraphs in which Yates gives us every detail of what might have taken only three or four minutes, he follows with a swiftly stacked description of events that probably occurred over two hours or so: they cheered, laughed, shook hands, kissed, somebody went out for beer, they sang, and on and on . . . UNTIL . . .

. . . UNTIL this last colloquialism — they’d better knock it off and get a good night’s sleep. It’s hard to see this as anything less than brilliant. Yates wraps up the evening with a backslapping, chummy admonishment, not only as if we readers were in the Laurel Players ourselves, but by its being low-brow — knock it off — he deflects the reader from thinking he has been manipulated by his mastery of language at all. Yates is tucking the reader right into his pocket here. He has tugged all the strings he wanted to in the first two paragraphs, and now that he has us, let’s settle down to the story. As if we were sharing a booth in a dim Boston pub.

It’s been a noisy week in . . . here.

Item: The tonnage of stuff to do has fairly collapsed my cheap but lovable desk, and there’s been no time to read much of anything, but a book due this coming Monday has received a gentle extension to the following Monday, so I’m able to forestall the coming heart attack for at least that long. Whew!

Item: My stacks of new books have grown a bit taller. I’m trying hard not to think of these precarious skyscrapers as an example of hoarding but as building a vast library on not much real estate.

Item: I can see light at the end of the tunnel. In the next few weeks, that book will be done, pages for another will have been proofed, we’ll have gone to France for a week, and my daughter will be home for four days then back to college, and I will have something like a month and a half to work on a new novel. It’s all worked out — these coming weeks — with the precision of a railroad timetable, with that singular goal: time to write something new. If one element lags, I’m in trouble. But I try not to think about it, so desperately do I covet that time.

So we use weekends. And write short Friday Book Reports.

When visiting classrooms, and the question comes up about what part of writing I like best, I often refer to the time spent writing a book as being inside a funnel.

At the beginning of the writing process, you find yourself luxuriating in the large end — the entry end — as if it were a giant pool. A world-sized pool, in fact. Everything is possible. The story can include this, it has room for that, and that other, marvelous episode will find a perfect home here, too. It is a liberating and expansive activity, these first days of writing.

As time moves on, however, you find yourself descending from the wide end toward the narrow end. You begin to understand that this particular story does not have room for all of those wonderful ideas. Well, that’s all right. You’re still able to move around, breathe freely. The story will be great.

And the days press on, weeks go by, and you’re still descending. Now, it’s not as much fun as those carefree days when you first stepped into the funnel. The light has diminished. Now you see the limitations of what you’ve undertaken. Problems creep in. Time wears on you. Didn’t you tell the editor you’d have this by the end of the month? Ooh, that’s coming closer. Still, you can stretch your arms, maybe not all the way, but the blood is still flowing.

And down you move. The sides of the funnel seem much closer now. You can’t quite turn around to see the sun anymore, though you still have light coming down over your shoulder. You have to lean a little closer to the page to read comfortably, but you expected that, didn’t you? Breathing is a bit more of an effort, and the air not as fresh as when you were back up there on the surface. And what day is it? Can I work weekends?

And as the space around your head gets smaller, your breathing shallows. Of course, it does; you don’t really have room to expand your lungs anymore. The characters are breathing more than they did before, too, so there’s less usable air. Plus, did you notice how they’re starting to get in your face now? The one you used to like, his dumb friend with the shaggy hair, that girl. You never realized before what a stinker she could be. But whatever, you said you loved them, thick and thin, and all that. It’s just that you’re all pressed up against one another and it’s dark and hot and you’re going to have to suck in all the air you can for the final push.

And there’s still more down to go. Uck, here there’s no movement at all. You can’t see the others now, but you feel them for sure, their hot breath on you. And you’re all but blinded by the dark and the heat, yet you know there must be an opening. All funnels have openings. My gosh, you’ve descended the entire length of the funnel, so there must be a way out! You can’t go back again anyway. A weight presses your head. You can’t really feel your legs anymore. You’ll have to pull yourself forward on your elbows. Yeah, yeah. You can do it. Sure you can . . . but what happened to the light? There is no light anymore. No air, either! So this is what it’s like to die. You gag. Suffocate. And you are suddenly so angry. You barely have anything anymore, but this sick hot anger.

And there is the eye of the funnel. That twinkle in the distance. My god, it’s small! Why would they ever design a funnel like this? With a top so broad and lively and the bottom no wider than the eye of a needle. Can you possibly crawl to it? Your elbows are bloody and have buckled now, so it’s all in the fingers, scraping your body inch by inch. You release your last breath, along with every living molecule of your body, to make yourself as small as possible. Scratch your way to it. Scratch, scratch . . .

And you are out.

You’re out. You gulp air as if you’ve just drowned, except that what you’ve just been through was worse than drowning. You died in there, didn’t you? Didn’t your heart actually stop? Didn’t your brain tremble and sigh and go still? But as your lungs fill, already the memory of your agony is beginning to fade. And look what the light shows. The story is done. It is finished, Lord. Breathe, breathe. And there she is. Her, the stinker. God, how I hated her. But she stretches in the light and maybe she looks all right. And him with the shaggy hair. He’s as dumb as anything, but he can be funny sometimes. Maybe another story, just about them.

Publication dates for most writers usually don’t mean anything. If your book isn’t fixed with a specific “lay-down” date, before which retailers are barred from selling the book and competing with the publisher’s promotional program, finished books are often available weeks ahead of the date selected by the publisher. They are often in stores before that date, have been noticed by bloggers, and they are usually in distribution online. This takes the sting or joy out of the actual event.

In most cases, prepublication reviews in the half-dozen or so trade journals that review books for young people have, or ideally should have, prepared the breathless community for the great coming.

This coming Tuesday, July 19, is the pub date for a book I’ve been involved in, although I’ve had advance copies for a few weeks. Of the half-dozen prepub journals, only three have weighed in. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of advance reading copies have been distributed for over eight months , but there have been only one or two blogger notices (out of how large a universe?), and no full online reviews. Hmm. All of which reminds me of a lesson I learned with my last book: that what is coming might not just be great. It might be a great silence.

It’s good simply to take note of such a silence when you hear it; and you do hear it. It’s that sudden moment in the bubbling conversation when for different reasons, perhaps, everyone pauses simultaneously to take a breath. In that moment, something falls off the edge and vanishes.

Sure, I know, the grapes that are sour. You’re right. But because the number of books being published is so large, the power of community-wide silence about one of them can be shockingly final. In the era of opening weekend receipts, it’s hard even for the writer not to be swept up in the instant reaction, good or bad, now let’s please move on. In any case, whether or not we pop a cork on Tuesday, I suppose I’ll pause for an instant and listen.

Several weeks now since the last issue, and I feel bad. They have been busy weeks, stacked with reading, teaching, writing, and all the other stuff that comes between; life, I suppose you could call it.

First, a catalog of the recent books to appear on the desk. While up at the residency in Cambridge, I found An American Type by Henry Roth, published posthumously last year and now in paper. It’s not at all bad, very good in spots (I’m still at the beginning), and reminds me here and there of, say, Fitzgerald at his breeziest. What is odd and beautiful is that the best of it displays the muscularity and vigor of a much younger writer, if I can generalize in so crude a fashion. It’s like reading the lost novel of a mid-century master. It’s not nearly so good as the greatest of that generation, I’m led to expect by the lackluster review quotes in the opening pages; but if I can stick with it, I’ll likely have my own opinion.

The Sportswriter by Richard Ford was mentioned by a fellow teacher, and so I picked that up as well. Speak, Memory by Nabokov was used in a seminar I sat in on, and while I had not been drawn to it before because there is little about his writing life in the book — it covers his early life — I was taken by the beauty of the passages read aloud and had to bring it into the workshop.

A bunch of craft books: On Writing by Stephen King; Anne Lamott‘s Bird by Bird; and David Lodge’s The Art of Fiction, which I’d read before and liked. I realized in putting together the study plans for my four new students, I could recommend only one or two craft titles; most being lightweight or lame. So I got hold of these to see if I can broaden my craft shelf. Also Matterhorn, The Eyes of Willie McGee, Claudette Colvin, and Tender is the Night.

But, to the teaching. There’s so much about teaching creative writing that I have to learn. Coming from a practitioner’s background, with so many books behind me, and more on their way, I find that while I may have the knowledge, I don’t have the technique to teach. Yet.

It’s a fascinating and vibrant area of thought and discussion, as all the long-time teachers out there already know. Erika Dreifus, Cathy Day, Stephanie Vanderslice, Mark McGurl — these are people I’m just beginning to read about, all theorizers (perhaps contradictory) about the pedagogy of the MFA system, none of them particularly known or known yet as novelists or creative writers, but with many intelligent things to say that I need to hear and consider.

Certainly, I’d love to someday be in the position of a Robert Frost or William Faulkner, standing frosty-haired in front of a class and simply reading my work, or, at most, answering questions with wit and grace; but until that time, I want to absorb the complicated and worthy art of teaching. Sure, I have to fit it in between all the book deadlines, but I’d like to believe it’s all a matter of, and only a matter of, time.