Spoke yesterday at a regional SCBWI conference at the Free Library in Guilford. Some 45 folks attended. It was a mess of a talk, all jumbled, the best part of which was that I was able to bring my friends along — in the sense that I quoted from several books by the writers who keep me company in my room when I write. Each of them dead, of course, or they wouldn’t all fit into my room or at the podium. The talk made so much more sense on my note cards than it did when I gave it, and it was so much less of a talk than a sort of confused rant.

Interestingly, the organizer of the event mentioned that she had actually met me some thirty-plus years ago and thought me, then, a kind of cross between Jesus and Charles Manson. A lovely image, and apt. For as it happened, a poor guy caused a five-car accident in Norwalk yesterday by running around naked, yelling, “I am Jesus!” And recalling my talk, I almost wonder if he wasn’t the one who delivered it. Alas, no. He was in police custody by then, so I have no one to blame but myself.

Still, the topic of it was, and is, one of the most fascinating I have come across in my years of writing: the interrelation, cross-pollination, mutual resonance — in novel writing — of fact and fiction, truth and imagination, reality and invention.

I did warn the folks that the remarks weren’t going to be tidy. At one point, I believe I denied the existence of God. Someone may or may not have walked out at that point. But I said it more to make the point that events are random; we struggle for meaning, but there really isn’t any, so our attempt to shape life into fiction is fraught with presumption and error. For me, the key word is Metaphor. As writers of fiction, we rely so heavily on invented meaning — something that journalists (I suppose) are not supposed to do. You don’t make connections where there are none, only for the sake of a point. Novelists do this all the time.

Yesterday I spoke for the third or fourth time to a sizable group about this book coming out next year, Lunch-Box Dream, since it was — or began as — my attempt at a metaphor-less story. Didn’t succeed in achieving that, or not in the same way I desired. It was simply too artistically . . . what’s the word? convenient? presumed? necessary? . . . to allow metaphors to assert themselves in the text. But there are some scenes. . . .

It’s rather easy to talk about the book before it is out. After it is out, I will either have to do a lot of defending, or not show myself publicly at all, or beg people to read it. Nothing pleasant will come out of it, either way. I suppose that’s okay, too. Writing shouldn’t be all that much fun. Or, rather, the writing can be fun, even deeply healing, and the editorial process, too, which I am enjoying immensely, but no one ever claimed that the actual publishing — the making public — of it, should be anything but, well, a mess.

What about the old man, the Census flyer, and the Ferris wheel? Yeah, I could tell you, but my friends know what I mean. I’m talking about those dead guys and the forty-five people at the Free Library. Minus one walkout.

. . . for as long as I did, dropping that fat book in and out of my Amazon shopping cart for weeks, before I succumbed to the inevitable and proceeded to checkout. Three Days Before the Shooting . . . the unfinished second novel, the mountain of pages finally printed, the bewildering fragment of forty-two years’ work, seen at last. Ralph Ellison lived plenty long after he published Invisible Man, but apparently not long enough. Some sixteen years after he died, we can finally take a look at the unkempt vastness, thanks to John Callahan and Adam Bradley’s joint editorship of the extant manuscripts.

As a prelude to diving into the 1100-plus page book, I am reading Bradley’s Ralph Ellison in Progress, his riveting analysis of its composition, while working through Juneteenth, the Callahan-edited fragment published in 1999, side by side with it. What strikes me so far, and I think this is important, is that Ellison never relinquished his faith in this particular story. Not once in his letters and interviews is there a hint of giving it up. How many writers, when months and years go by without seeing that second book come together, would continue with it? Let alone almost half a century? What sort of willpower did he have to not set the thing aside? Or on fire? Or give up writing altogether? But no. Ellison never quit, nor came up with another novel idea. This story was it. He had to tell it, no matter how long it took; there was no question but that he would see it through. Finally, forty-two years wasn’t enough time.

Part of the problem, as Bradley details, is the method of composition. After years of handwritten manuscripts and typescripts, Ellison adopted, in the early 1980s, the computer. The ease of endless revision — so seductive as an alternative to forward motion — proved to be insurmountable. But that wasn’t his only brick wall. Being one of the few — very few — black authors to achieve the level of recognition he did, when he did, meant that winning the National Book Award was a life-changer. Hereafter, Ellison was the man and simply had to be part of every event, every conference, every public conversation involving race. There were few others on his level of publication: Langston Hughes, certainly, though he was considered a lightweight in certain quarters. Richard Wright had abandoned the United States. James Baldwin was coming along, but was apt, it seems from this distance, to rub folks the wrong way. Ellison was Olympian; not a small part of this was that by his own admission his novel was written with the white literary hierarchy in view. He disdained any criticism that limited his achievement — as some reviewers did — as something pretty good for a Negro writer. The outcome of his focused attempt to publish with white readers in mind — and his more-than-brilliant result — was that he was more eagerly accepted by the white literary world and all its ganglia. This meant that Ralph became one very busy man.

The point I keep coming back to and that I find utterly compelling is that Ellison did not draw away from this single plot, nor sketch out any other story that did not find its place in this massive work. And even those thousands of pages of manuscript are deceiving, for somewhere Bradley states that the base narrative of Three Days . . . is not much longer than Invisible Man. How many hundreds of thousands of words were later computer reworkings of the same 600 pages of story?

All this puts me in mind of the sequence of books, one to the next. You have written one book. Fine. It has a certain . . . character, let’s say. How does your next book angle off from it? There are some writers, and you know who they are, who will write the same kind of story with each book. Publishers certainly like this. Librarians do, too. “Oh, for that kind of story, you go here.” All that is practical and fine. But there are other writers and other kinds of stories, and the psychology of a progress, no matter how hidden or bent — why this book after that book? — is intimate and compelling.

Having just returned from Rochester, that island of lovely lawns in the thumb knuckle of Michigan (as described by natives), I’m beginning to “unpack” the mind — stuffed from a week of school visits, lunches, dinners, a banquet, and thousand-book signings, all hosted by the town’s extraordinary Authors in April program, a feat of organization made possible by hundreds of volunteers, a fleet of cars, a bizarre delivery truck, a slobbering St. Bernard, a pen-protector’s worth of Sharpies, multiple participating restaurants, and over ten thousand students from Kindergarten to 8th grade. Whew!

It was Anne and Robin, hilarious co-drivers on Thursday, who provided one of the most memorable moments, when they pulled away from the AiA parking slot (at, I think, Meadow Brook Elementary) so handily outlined by those orange rubber cones, by trying to pull one with us.

“What’s that sound?”
“Oh, we didn’t?”
“Oh, yeah, we did.”

So, leaving Anne laughing at the wheel, Robin and I hopped out to restore order to the parking slot for the next author.

Good times.

Meanwhile, we’re still unpacking here, chuckling over the memories.

. . . in Chattanooga on an errand or two, I saw a crumpled dollar bill, so barely touching the ground it must have just fallen there, though there was no one directly ahead of or behind me. You know how your heart thrills to see that particular green in an untypical place; mine did, and instinctively I scooped it up. Feeling vaguely as if I’d been seen, I offered it to the first people I saw, a couple paused on the walk ahead, one of them shaking something out of her shoe. They thanked me, but no, it wasn’t theirs. Well, okay. I held it loosely in my fingers for another half block or so, still proving I was ready to give it up, but after a while it was just me pinching a dollar weirdly in my fingers, so I pocketed it. Later, can you believe it, one dollar turned out to be exactly the price of three postcards, and picking up postcards was one of the reasons I was walking down Broad Street to begin with. I chose two of Lookout Mountain and one of the Choo Choo. The whole business formed a nice, round episode — beginning, middle, and end — and how often does that happen?

There is a breakfast place some fifteen to twenty minutes away by back roads that is just about the perfect setting for work. Not the serious work you need to do in quiet isolation, but for the kind of journalistic observation that keeps the mind swept and tidy.

The restaurant, which seems a far too grand word for it, is set on a spit of land between two roads and surrounded by a ball field, a cemetery, and a service station. The roads, the field, and the station provide some background noise, the cemetery usually not (there is reportedly a “white lady” who wanders around on certain October nights, though she is fairly quiet, and the place closes at three in the afternoon anyway).

The appeal is, finally, less about the food, which is excellent, than it is about the conversation that happens in it. And not necessarily your own conversation. Because often you come alone: just the food, the table, the books stacked next to your coffee mug, and the room. The conversations that float from the other tables are what you enjoy, and particularly because they are all that float. There is no piped in soundtrack, no speaker over your head, no artificial sound of any kind.

Or nearly none. You can hear music, rarely, and the soft whine of a radio, but only coming from the kitchen, only at certain hours, only if there is a momentary silence, and only if you are seated at one of the tables in the inside room. Which you don’t normally do because the light is plainly insufficient to read and write by. This little bit of music serves less to distract than to conjure up the unseen kitchen staff, two or three amiable folks bent over the grill and the waffle iron, spooning oatmeal into bowls, slicing fruit.

So you choose a table near the window to become your desk. The moment of opening up a book, or a notebook, as your coffee is delivered, is a tiny ceremony in a life of rush and spin. So you begin to read and think and eat and write and think and read. That’s all, and it’s enough.

O, the beckoning road! Day Two of our journey dawned and ended in sunlight, as we packed up, set our sights south, and drove out of Cleveland. Eventually.

There was a bit of trouble finding the exact route out of the city, as the Triptik didn’t start exactly from the old house in South Euclid. We zigged and zagged for a bit before finding Warrensville Center Road, then crawled along until we were out, passing lots of “City of . . . ” signs along the way before reaching what you’d call the Cleveland limits. Then south.

Farmlands. The scene was repeated hundreds of times: a house on a rise over the old road, outbuildings, silos, fences, and open scrubby fields. rolling and stretching away for acres.

Our first real stop was in the lovely Mt. Gilead, and you’ll know why when you read the book. After that it was to Delaware (our original first night’s stop, but not this time), for a (late) lunch at Bun’s restaurant with Floyd and Stella Dickman and Tami Furlong, whose gem of a children’s only bookstore, Fundamentals, is right across the street. Signed some books. If you’re anywhere in mid-Ohio, you already know what we discovered yesterday: that Fundamentals is a must for anyone interested in children’s literature. Tami also stocks toys there, which we hear children also like.

After lunch we went off the old route for a personal homage. Since Delaware is only a half hour from north Columbus, we had to stop. You know where.

O, the beckoning Thurber!

The James Thurber’s house sits on the greatest little square there. The house wasn’t open, but the door unlocked, and when we pulled it open we found the staff in a meeting in one of the rooms. “I’m sorry, we’re closed.” Time to be a little forward. Explained that we came from forever and were only passing through and since the Thurber house has a pretty awesome Children’s Writer in Residence program, we just wanted to introduce ourselves. Pat Shannon scuttled away for a moment and came back to say that we could walk around for a few minutes. O! And also O! Into the rooms, up the narrow stairs. His room! The door to grandpa’s attic. Where the bed fell!

Lisa Yee, you know what I’m talking about!

South again, thinking to end the evening in Ripley on the border. Didn’t last that long. Got to Hillsboro. And into Kentucky!

Day One of the trip started with an early rising to get to LaGuardia for an 8:40 flight. Without a hitch, even driving in the remaining drizzle from our latest rainstorm. Arrived a bit early in Cleveland, that mecca by the lake, picked up rental car. First stop: my old house, which I haven’t seen since 1961.

It turns out to have been altered superficially from my long-ago time in it, some owners having closed in the carport and changed the window arrangement on the front. More on emotional upheavals at a later time and place. From there, straight to Joseph-Beth Booksellers, whom we had previously contacted to say wouldn’t it be nice if we stopped in. They agreed. Signed some books. Met Katie, Children’s manager. Cool.

On the second day, we planned to drive south toward Delaware and our first little stop, this time, fifty-one years later, to lunch with our friend Floyd Dickman, and stop in at Fundamentals, a bookstore right across the street from Bun’s restaurant.

More to come.

. . . starts on Wednesday. At the desk, we are in the middle of final revisions on a novel coming out next year, a story based in part on a journey taken with our brother, mother, and grandmother in 1959. The replication of that long-ago trip, from Cleveland to Atlanta, will fix in place a handful of geographic and scenic details we feel impelled to get right, though the story itself is quite done. We have not been back to Cleveland since 1961, and are anxious about visiting the old homestead again. It still exists, apparently, though you might have thought it would go the way of the dirigible. A half century seems a fairly long time, but we’ll have a better understanding of that next week.

The route we took back then is only known because the original AAA Triptik from 1959 has been preserved. Mom saved everything, a blessing in this case. One interesting note: according to the Triptik, after leaving Cleveland we stayed at a place called El Siesta in Delaware, Ohio. This makes an appearance in the novel and, indeed, still exists. On the manuscript we’re now working on, our editor queried the improper El in the motel’s name. But there it is, in our travel documents and in real life. What more will we find? There is a Facebook fan page at which we’ll post updates from the road.

. . . was an unfamiliar term until Thursday evening when I was honored to speak to a group of them. For over thirty years, the School of Education at the University of Connecticut (known as the Neag School) has paired its student teachers with cooperating teachers — seasoned professionals in elementary, middle, and high schools in the towns around UConn, to create a continuum of learning and support that, as was plain on Thursday, benefits both the veterans and recruits in equal measure. It’s an outstanding program with a long history and, we hope, a longer future.

We talked about stories (of course), inspiration, Pico Della Mirandola, Kafka, and the combined responsibility of teachers and children’s writers to shed some light for our children in the dark world. Yes, the dark world. It’s not a very nice place out there right now, reminding us of all sorts of maudlin but nevertheless very possibly accurate Wordsworthian claims of the angelic primacy of childhood. But then you look into the faces, young and old, of that audience at Rose Commons, and you cannot help but see the bright side. So many college seniors on the verge of making this a better place. We can hope, after all.

The event was sponsored by the Neag School, their program Teachers for a New Era, which rings with hope and vitality, and Phi Lambda Theta, a fraternity with a special focus on education. Thank you, Neag, TNE, and all, for a lovely evening among the good.

When I was younger, though not so very much younger that I shouldn’t have known better, I found myself puzzling over the question: when are you exactly half your father’s age? Working it out longhand, through some trial and error, I discovered of course that it’s when you are the same age he was when you were born. It’s a fact of mathematical beauty that had escaped me until then, but here I rely on the Great Detective’s ignorance of our planetary system; or as my daughter once said in a skit: “My mind is very much taken over.”

This fact was brought back to me the other day when I was digging in my mother’s house and found a packet of letters, postcards, school drawings, mass cards, and assorted paper items on the floor in the back of a closet stuffed with clothes.

“What do you see?” Lord Carnarvon asks.
“Wonderful things!” Howard Carter responds.

Or something like that. In addition to a couple of dozen postcards and letters to my mother (and her children) from my grandmother at various stops on her many-visaed 1960 trip to Vienna and the Eastern Bloc to visit her family in Budapest, there were two letters from my father to my mother while he was at Georgetown and she was in Ohio with her sons trying to support all four of us. I was six at the time of the letters, my father thirty-six, or over twenty years younger than I am now.

I won’t divulge the contents of the letters, though they are commonplace. That (right, that) seems an invasion of some kind. But the tone of them was absolutely familiar from a far earlier part of my own life, and a bit sad. It’s a wonder anyone ever took me seriously when I was that way. Apparently more is granted to a father. They included a kind of apologetic yearning, both self-defacing and pleading, and a petulance that I suppose is entirely genetic. It will take some re-readings to absorb the letters, or, rather for them to slot themselves into the spectrum of emotions one carries away from childhood. I suppose the menacing edifice of Father does not expect bundles of letters from his youth to be ferreted out of dead peoples’ closets.

I was speaking to a friend the other day about this very thing. He told me he had dicovered a raft of letters from his father to his mother before they were married and agreed with his siblings to leave them unread. I can completely see that. These seemed more in the nature of reports from a distant city which, in small ways, they were. In the meantime, the ferreting and slotting goes on.